The Newest Member of the Lab

With a good plan in place, leaving the lab for family leave can go fairly smoothly, says this article at The Scientist. One of the first steps is to investigate the policies that your institute, or potential new institute, has for leave, tenure, and child care. In addition, Bob Grant at The Scientist says it's good to make friends, both with colleagues in your lab and outside — that way you know that your samples will be taken care of and that your collaborators will continue to work while you're gone. Another step to take, Grant says, is to develop a status report of your projects that includes the experimental details and progress of your experiments to give to the lab manager. "If I knew, as a supervisor, that my employee had thought through those things already and showed that they had a plan, I'd know that there was a good possibility that when they came back things would be very stable," says Gail Simmons from Manhattanville College.