The Double-Booked Research Shift
You are a second-year undergraduate research assistant in a lab studying sleep and memory. Your supervisor, Dr. Okafor, scheduled you for a 6-hour data collection session on Saturday. On Friday night, your roommate-who is also your ride and the only person with a car on campus-tests positive for the flu and asks you to stay home to avoid spreading it. You feel fine. The study has 14 participants scheduled tomorrow, each paid $40, and canceling means re-recruiting and delaying the study by at least three weeks. Dr. Okafor is at a conference and unreachable until Monday. A first-year assistant, Priya, has been trained on the protocol but has never run a session alone. You have her number.
1. What do you do about Saturday's session, and what is your reasoning?
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The core tension is between obligation to the study and participants and honesty about a genuine exposure risk. Key considerations:
- Feeling fine is not the same as being unexposed; flu has an incubation period, and you shared a room with a confirmed case.
- 14 participants and $560 in payments plus a 3-week delay is a real cost, but so is exposing participants-some may be immunocompromised.
- Dr. Okafor is unreachable, so you cannot get an authoritative decision; you must act within your role.
A defensible path: contact Priya and ask her to co-run or lead the session with you present remotely or in a distanced/PPE role if the protocol allows, and simultaneously start the chain to reach Dr. Okafor through a backup contact (department admin, co-investigator). Do not simply show up as if nothing happened, and do not unilaterally cancel a $560+ study without exhausting options. Communicate the uncertainty honestly rather than deciding silently.
Grading looks for: naming the competing obligations, refusing to hide the exposure, seeking the least-harmful workable option, and escalating appropriately rather than deciding alone.
2. Suppose Priya says she is willing to run the session alone but is clearly nervous and asks you not to tell Dr. Okafor she did it unsupervised. How do you respond?
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Two issues are entangled: participant safety/protocol integrity and a request to conceal information from a supervisor.
- Agreeing to secrecy would put Priya in a position where an error has no oversight and would make you complicit in hiding a deviation from the PI.
- Priya's willingness is generous but does not resolve the training gap; an unsupervised first session on a protocol she's never run alone is a real risk to data quality and participant welfare.
A good response accepts her help while removing the secrecy: propose that she run it with you available by phone/video for the parts she's unsure of, and that you will tell Dr. Okafor what happened and why, framing it as a contingency you both handled responsibly. Reassure Priya that you'll share the accountability rather than scapegoating her. If she still refuses without secrecy, that changes your options-you'd escalate rather than pressure her.
Grading looks for: refusing concealment, protecting Priya from being set up to fail, and finding a supervised middle path.
3. After the weekend, Dr. Okafor returns and asks, 'Did anything unusual happen?' What do you say?
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Full, timely, non-defensive disclosure is the right move, even though nothing catastrophic happened.
- Report the roommate's illness and your exposure, the fact that you couldn't reach her, that Priya ran (or co-ran) the session, and any protocol deviations or data-quality concerns.
- Don't minimize or omit the unsupervised element to look competent; the PI needs accurate information to judge whether the data are usable and whether to adjust procedures.
- Offer to help re-run any questionable sessions and to document what happened.
Grading looks for: candor over self-protection, specificity, and taking responsibility rather than blaming the situation or Priya.