>>12051107The short answer is no, the long answer is "it depends".
I'm a grad student (3 months from defending). I've worked in my current lab for 6 years, and have worked in a few other labs as well.
Everything 100% depends on your PI. Most PIs will not let you do a home project. Some will be asshats about it. A few are oldschool still and will let you do whatever the fuck you want, and encourage it. Again, this comes with tax dollars and how certain PIs view things.
For example, my PI would be uncomfortable and tell me "no" to home projects. She's bureaucratic. BUT, we all definitely have an arrangement where I can do whatever the fuck I want as long as work gets done. She doesn't oversee what I do since she's busy doing her own shit, and she couldn't give a flying fuck as long as I bring her something finished once a week. It's part of the unspoken agreement that if I'm here really late, I'm probably cracking open a beer and/or doing my own personal things.
Using reusable resource (glassware, certain equipment) is basically totally fine. Again, she doesn't want to see it, since then she's liable. Other stuff like consumables is a lot more "don't use it" unless its cheap as fuck.
I homebrew beer, for example. I've definitely used our autoclave after hours to sterilize wort, and I've made agar plates in lab/yeast food from lab for my yeast strains.
The PI next door also brews beer, and we talk about it constantly. He actually keeps his brewing yeast strains in his -80. Researcher upstairs who retired recently used to make LSD in his lab (since that's what they researched). He absolutely synthesized some for personal reasons.
TEM you probably couldn't use, unless you snuck in a sample with your own real data collection. If its departmental, usually its hours-billable to the PI, so if you are going to take 20 minutes to use it while in the middle of your project, I see no harm.
To use a TEM it takes sample prep, though,which can be expensive, so that might be a no.
