The cost of “free” interns in animal labs

On paper, interns seem like a great idea.

They’re motivated. Affordable. Sometimes even free.

But in practice, relying on poorly trained interns for critical observation and measurement tasks ends up costing more. I saw this firsthand in my PhD and at Olden, we’ve seen this across dozens of labs:

 • Interns miss subtle behaviors due to inexperience

 • Scoring is inconsistent across observers or shifts

 • Data needs to be re-scored or discarded entirely

 • Full-time staff spend hours supervising or correcting errors

One postdoc told us bluntly:

“We had to re-run the study because the intern mislabeled half the behaviors.”

It’s not the intern’s fault. These tasks require training, attention, and consistency and persistence.

There is a deceptively hard learning curve - procedures seem easy, until you realize that:

• one small systematic mistake substantially changed animal behavior (such as a shadow in a behavioral arena) or

• your accuracy degraded systematically towards the end of the day or

• your handling method caused mice to become increasingly stressed, systematically affecting measurements or

• order and time-of-day matters

Most of all - postdocs and PhDs just don't want to put in the time to fully train someone who they know will soon leave the lab.

From the intern's perspective, the point of an internship is to learn. Forcing an intern through soul crushingly dull days of manual measurements is possibly the most effective way to kill a kindling interest in science. 

So - if you work with interns for animal studies - please don't expect free labor. Train them well. You either pay with time or money - or both. It will pay massive dividends.