> one semester on old equipment that would break during the experiment
I saw that as a learning opportunity, teaches you which glues are cryo-proof, how to switch fuses on amplifiers (and other, more complicated electronics quick-fixes), and how important knowing people to borrow equipment from is.
Unless your lab is swimming in money, those are valuable skills for an experimentalist. And even if you swim in money, buying fancy new stuff has a minimum 8 week lead time while walking down the hall to the correct shelf to pilfer takes 5 minutes and gets you results before lunch.
> with less than motivated PhD students or post grads as teachers
This is an unfortunate truth everywhere I taught. Unfortunately, teaching the same thing 14 times a semester is no fun, and every single person who enjoys teaching (and is good at it) knows it, and instead teaches any available lecture, seminar, tutorial or exercise - anything, where you get to teach something new every week and that allows you to stay with the same students for longer.
I saw that as a learning opportunity, teaches you which glues are cryo-proof, how to switch fuses on amplifiers (and other, more complicated electronics quick-fixes), and how important knowing people to borrow equipment from is.
Unless your lab is swimming in money, those are valuable skills for an experimentalist. And even if you swim in money, buying fancy new stuff has a minimum 8 week lead time while walking down the hall to the correct shelf to pilfer takes 5 minutes and gets you results before lunch.
> with less than motivated PhD students or post grads as teachers
This is an unfortunate truth everywhere I taught. Unfortunately, teaching the same thing 14 times a semester is no fun, and every single person who enjoys teaching (and is good at it) knows it, and instead teaches any available lecture, seminar, tutorial or exercise - anything, where you get to teach something new every week and that allows you to stay with the same students for longer.