Short answer: closed-toe shoes, hair tied back, and your lab manual actually read beforehand. You do not need to bring safety glasses, the lab provides those. The kit is the easy part; the thing that costs people is treating labs as optional and forgetting the online tests attached to them.
What you actually need
- Closed-toe shoes. The single most important item, and the most common reason people get turned away at the door. Sandals or open shoes will not get you in.
- Long hair tied up. Same idea. It is a safety requirement around flames, reagents and equipment, and demonstrators will pull you up on it.
- Lab coat. You have to buy your own, it is not provided. Get one in the first week rather than scrambling to borrow one every fortnight.
- Your lab manual, read in advance. More on this below, because it matters more than any other item here.
- A pen and a calculator. Phones often are not acceptable as calculators during assessed work.
What you do not need to bring
Safety glasses. The lab supplies them. Do not waste money buying a pair, and do not panic if you have not got any, they will be there when you arrive.
Read the manual before you turn up
This is the difference between a useful three hours and a wasted three hours. If you arrive having read the pre-lab, you know what the experiment is for and you can actually think about what you are seeing. If you arrive cold, you spend the session following instructions like a recipe and learn very little.
There is also a social dimension nobody mentions in the course handbook: most labs pair you up, and if you have not prepared, your partner carries you. This is especially noticeable in CELS191, where the practicals move quickly and the person who did the pre-lab ends up doing the thinking for both of you. Do not be that partner.
How long you will actually be there
This varies by paper and is worth knowing before you plan your day.
HUBS labs: you typically stay for the full scheduled session regardless of how quickly you work through the material. It is a long block, and it gets genuinely tiring if your stream is an evening one. Plan for the whole slot, eat properly beforehand, and do not schedule anything tight immediately after.
Most other labs: once you have finished your work and had it checked off, you can usually leave. Being prepared is therefore worth real time back in your evening, which is another argument for doing the pre-lab.
The part that actually affects your grade
Attendance at practicals is a terms requirement in several HSFY papers. That means it is not participation credit, it is a condition of passing the paper at all. Missing labs without going through the proper process is one of the few genuinely unrecoverable mistakes available to you in first year.
If you are sick or something goes wrong, contact the course administrator early and follow their process. Departments are generally reasonable about real problems and much less reasonable about silence.
Do not donate the easy marks
Most papers attach small online tests to the practicals, usually a couple of percent each. They are typically open book, often allow multiple attempts with your best mark counting, and are among the cheapest marks in the entire year.
People lose them by forgetting the deadline. That is the whole failure mode. Put every one in your calendar the moment it is announced, because giving away two percent to a forgotten quiz stings in a year decided by fractions of a GPA point.
Getting value out of the session
- Ask the demonstrators things. They are usually senior students or postgrads, they are there to help, and it is the cheapest one-to-one explanation you will get all semester.
- Write down what you actually did, including what went wrong. Reports and exit tests are far easier when your notes reflect reality rather than the idealised method.
The honest framing
Labs are rarely where students win or lose their GPA, but they are where a small number of people create avoidable disasters, either by failing terms or by handing back the free assessment marks. Turn up in the right shoes, prepare, submit the tests on time, and labs quietly stop being a risk.
Then put your real study effort where the marks actually are, which is exam practice. You can start free on Cutline.
