The advanced lab training lasts 2 semesters and is meant to provide undergraduate students in their final year with practical knowledge about the most common methods used in marine biological research. The course is held in co-operation with the Institute of Baltic Research in Rostock-Warnemünde (IOW), and it is subdivided into thematic blocks, each of them being concluded with a written report. The last block is a so-called "Semesterarbeit", i.e. an individual student research project for which the new methodological knowledge has to be applied. In view of their "Diplom" exam project, students often take this as an opportunity to become acquainted with topics and workgroups, including external places like the AWI (Helgoland, Sylt, Bremen), MPI (Bremen) or in foreign countries. Two exams have to be written during the advanced lab, and their results are relevant for the participation certificate.
A lab work report is mainly intended to describe the experiments and data treatment in a way that would allow to retrace them at a later stage (e.g. when learning for an exam). Each block of the lab course has to be documented in a separate report which should match the following guidelines:
Introduction: The introduction has to explain the general context and the relevance of the work. In publications, this would be the part where the present scientific understanding of the topic would be summarised using literature references. Hence, describe the background knowledge related to the experiments. Subsequently, the working hypothesis or the aims of the experiment need to be outlined. A simple reference to the lab script will not suffice! Instead, focus on answering the following: "what does the experiment show, which questions does it address?".
Methods: This section should describe the experimental layout. Do not just copy from the script! Also, useless details about familiar methods should be omitted, as well as the serial numbers of a instrument. However, the general set-up needs to be sketched and any unusual approaches like e.g. new or differing procedures have to be explained here. A good methods section should enable the reader to understand what has been done and to reproduce the experiment (sampling strategy, number of replicates, special observations, etc.).
Results: The results section has to present the obtained data in a neutral way, omitting any kind of interpretation. To do so, the text should describe the most important results and draw the attention on significant data. In addition, graphs and tables are adequate means of visualisation. They should be explicitly referred to in the main text, in the form: "fig. 1" or "table 1", and they need individual legends which provide information about what to see and how to understand the displayed data. be aware of methodological limitations: a normal kitchen thermometer does not display 5 decimals! By the way, "negative" results such as a lacking trend may be of a much higher value than unreflected curves across uncorrelated data.
Discussion: This is where your own interpretation has to be given. How do the obtained data compare to your own knowledge and to literature? Particularly unexpected results need to be addressed now. Also, potential sources of errors - either method-related or due to how the equipment was handled - have to be discussed. Finally, the discussion should answer the questions that were mentioned in the introduction.
Each group in the advanced lab training has to write a separate report. In case responsibilities for specific parts are shared, please indicate the respective authors.
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