SEAN ROBINSON: So the technical staff consists of myself and two more people. Our job is to maintain all the equipment, develop new experiments. In practice, we also end up teaching a lot. Something that's very common is a student is struggling with an experiment. They don't quite understand how their measurement is working.
They've worked with the section leader. They've worked with the grad TA in trying to figure it out. And at some point, they really just believe the experiment is just broken. That's the point in which we call in the technical staff, and we figure out. And more often than not, it's not broken.
It's just working with the apparatus is actually just very confusing. There are lots of degrees of freedom in operating any given piece of apparatus. And it's oftentimes the technical staff who know more about what's happening in the apparatus and getting them to give good data than sometimes some of the other people. Just because we're here in every single section.
