Why not see if a "higher up" might not sign-off on having you reimbursed?

The only reason I am aware of this being a problem is if you are dealing with expenses from the last financial year as expenses need to be submitted in time to close the books for that year. It may be for some organizations that quarterly periods are also sacrosanct and so delayed expense reimbursement may throw off quarterly earnings reports.

Most biology programs require animal dissection as part of the labs at some point. I did plant bio, but my required animal lab classes had fetal pig, lamprey, dogfish, and bony fish dissections, plus a bunch of arthropods and worms. Your program may vary in its requirements, but your academic adviser can tell you what classes you need and then you can review syllabi from there to pick the path of least dissections. Post-school jobs will vary widely in the amount of dissection/necropsy work necessary, but I'd imagine from my experience that most any type of research job in the field will involve dissection.

I worked in a couple labs in my biology department back in the day--I was a plants person, though. One lab around the corner from mine did neuroscience research on rats and anole lizards; that research involved placing probes in the animals' skulls and eventual euthanasia. Another lab had zebra fish--no probes but a lot of lethal experiments there. Yet another lab did lethal research in hatchery salmon and sturgeon. The affiliated medical school used lots of rodents, a few dogs, and even fewer monkeys in some of their work.

All of these labs had to file all sorts of paperwork at the college, state, and federal levels laying out the basis for the research; why the animal models were necessary; how many animals were needed; what types of experiments would the animals be subjected to; how the animals would be housed, fed, and otherwise cared for; if the experiment involved euthanasia or intentional injury, researchers had to convincingly explain why the animals would be sacrificed and how it would be done in non-painful way; and so on. In essence, all of the researchers had to prove to a committee of their peers that there was no way around doing what they were doing without sacrificing some animals. It's not like at the turn of the previous century, when med students trapped cats and dogs for vivisections with the endorsement of their teachers.

Even I, dealing with plants, was tangentially involved in the deaths of a couple of rabbits as part of my research (they were used to make polyclonal antibodies). And that took a mountain of paperwork, even though my lab supervisor was paying an outside company to make the antibodies.

I will state, though, that if you plan to go to medical school and study neuroscience, you'll have to do gross anatomy. While you could probably avoid much of the animal dissection, there's no way of which I'm aware that you could study medicine and opt out of gross anatomy.

Post education? Like will your 40hr work week as a research scientist involve dissecting? I don't think it has to.

I think it may be tough to get into a neuro-bio grad program without undergrad bio lab experience that involves either dissecting or surgery.

Animal behavior programs may be less biologically invasive but still heavy with the neuroscience.

I was an Anthro major myself, but one of my friend doubled in Neuro-bio & Psychology.

These kind of activities are often found in the accompanying lab components of some basic and advanced biology, anatomy, and physiology/biochemical processes courses. My experiences date back a few decades and even then the trend was to go from every student dealing with an individual animal to having lab groups of 4-6 students work on one organism. It was seen as both a lower cost measure as well as being more appropriate in impacting less numbers of animals.

The truth was it also allowed some of those individuals who were less than comfortable in physically dealing with the tasks to be more observers of the process. As long as you are obviously committed to understanding the material and are willing to support the group you are in, then you can still be an active group member. There is much to be said for direct observation of physical anatomy that 2D representation (photos and diagrams) does not provide.

I would not want any of these experiences be a gatekeeper from you pursuing a particular career. Explore the final career destinations you are interested in, research the credentials and education you need to achieve those positions and continue to work backwards from there to see what course content is part of those programs. Then you can go about talking with representatives of those programs to see what kind of experiences you will be expected to participate in.

Some of expanding your knowledge in biological studies is to focus your attention on the physical structures, the physiological functioning and interplay of the biochemical processes of life. Understanding the normal and known is important to be able to field the problems of when these systems are abnormal and in dysfunction.

It's not an arbitrary deadline, and it probably is legal unless you have some kind of written contract or can find documentation in an employee handbook that doesn't specify deadlines to turn in expenses. Even then I don't think there's any law against not paying reimbursements to employees.

I'm researching the IRS requirements for accountable reimbursement plans right now for the place I work at. This is the plan your employer uses, and there are IRS requirements about timeliness (Publication 463):

To be an accountable plan, your employer's reimbursement or allowance arrangement must include all of the following rules.

Your expenses must have a business connection — that is, you must have paid or incurred deductible expenses while performing services as an employee of your employer.

You must adequately account to your employer for these expenses within a reasonable period of time.

You must return any excess reimbursement or allowance within a reasonable period of time.

 

[snip]

The definition of reasonable period of time depends on the facts and circumstances of your situation. However, regardless of the facts and circumstances of your situation, actions that take place within the times specified in the following list will be treated as taking place within a reasonable period of time.

You receive an advance within 30 days of the time you have an expense.

You adequately account for your expenses within 60 days after they were paid or incurred.

You return any excess reimbursement within 120 days after the expense was paid or incurred.

You are given a periodic statement (at least quarterly) that asks you to either return or adequately account for outstanding advances and you comply within 120 days of the statement.

 

If you don't turn your reimbursements in within the reasonable time frame, and the employer pays you anyways, they are supposed to include that amount with your taxable income for the year. Many places may not be that strict in actual practice, but they may not want to risk it. Plus it screws up the company's financial and tax reporting to pay an expense that old.

I believe that all businesses are encouraged or required by the IRS to have written policy about their accountable plan requirements - some have stricter timelines, some have expense caps - but there should be something that was approved by the company officers in writing. A lot of places have employees sign a form saying they have read and understood the requirements when they first start working - do you remember if you did this? If the requirements were changed you should have gotten an updated form.

Unless the person you spoke with is the CFO for your company you could ask a higher up if it's still possible to be reimbursed. It's not their fault you forgot to turn it in on time, so I'm not surprised they refused to pay this one. Definitely make a note to be more timely in the future - I've been late plenty of times with things like this, and nobody likes someone who is late with financial documentation.

Oh - if you itemize your tax deduction you can include this expense but it means filling out Form 2106 in addition to everything else.

In the recent past I worked for a large organization (2000-plus employees) that required us to file our travel and expense reports in a timely manner. It was explained to me that, in layman's terms, a pot of money is set aside to pay this stuff within certain timeframes (monthly or quarterly). If the travel money from quarter 1 wasn't fully exhausted, it was moved to another pot of money to pay for something else. It may be a case that your employer set aside money to pay for travel during time period x, and once the accounts have been settled on time period x, the remainder of the funds are moved to time period y travel reimubrsement, or might be re-purposed entirely to pay for a new coffee pot. Who knows.

The point is, that companies and organizations often budget a certain amount to pay for travel and expense reimbursement for a given timeframe. If the time runs out before the money, they move the money. You might be too late, the money might be, for lack of a better word, "gone." I am not aware of any law that prevents this, it seems to be a standard practice among companies and institutions.

Best bet is to set a reminder on your phone or email to remember to file the report in a timely manner next time. If it's due on Feb 15, set a reminder for Feb 12 or something. Sorry.

From a legal perspective, you are owed the money if you did not have notice of the deadline. But there is not a clear cut statute or simple way to explain the law. Sorry.
-Alex

Decide which you need more...
the $100 or your job.
If this is a matter of principle and you want to make the point that your boss dropped the ball, pursue it over their head.

Frankly, $100 is no small matter to me. But is it worth your job?

PS: Could you attach this receipt to the next round of re-imbursement so that they process it for you, even though it's a bit tardy?

I have no idea if there is a law or not but if I turned in an expense report that was "several months" old, I'd expect them to at least come lecture me about being a slacker before paying it, and possibly reject it completely (but unlikely at my laid back job).

Overall, you have to accept some of the fault here, and can't blame it all on a technicality you were never informed about. It seems like relatively common knowledge to me that you can expect problems if you don't get your expense reports in as soon as possible.

On the flip side, companies have rules too, and they may not be able to legally fulfill expense reports after a certain date because of a law or an agreement with their bank or an internal policy.

craigslist
bulletin boards at the local grocer or cafe
college workstudy offices
and
the space travel agency of greenwood --the best!

http://www.826national.org/

They have a Seattle chapter in phinny ridge area. It's volunteer run by local writers etc. They're a kick ass org it's either free or cheap.

God, math education.

Everyday Math is a successor to Chicago Math, which is a distant successor to New Math, etc. etc.

Chicago Math used the approach of "here's a topic, and here's one example of that topic, and now we're moving on." This is a simplified version, but I think you get the idea. Students didn't do so well with the approach because there wasn't enough (or really any) repetition of topics.

So, then came Everyday Math. It's founded on lots of repetition, but of very flawed methods. For example, students learn to use methods for multiplication and division that utterly fail to teach them how these basic operations work, which sets them up for problems in later math classes like algebra. (My husband has had to teach college students long division so that they could do their algebra homework because they never learned in K-12.) The methods are based on "close enough" answers and lots of guesswork, which is harmful when in later math and other courses you need exact answers. There are substantially more points of entry for calculation errors in Everyday Math than in old-school methods, meaning that doing the work can lead you to the wrong answer, and it's difficult to see where you screwed up. It's about as dumb as a failed initiative in Indiana, I believe, to decree that pi=3.14 and no more. That's fine and dandy at a basic level, I guess, but woe to the structural engineer and those who traverse the bridge s/he designed.

There is also a strong distaste in much current math education for actually forcing students to memorize anything by rote. Lattice multiplication (a darling of Everyday Math) doesn't work with single digit numbers, and a shockingly large number of students in these programs have no idea how to calculate 6x4, for example, without calculators. Take away the tech, and these students are left to laboriously add or count to get answers.

Teaching is difficult, and math can be especially challenging. If your district's math pedagogy method relies exclusively on story problems to hopefully teach students the underlying principles by osmosis, you've got to hope that your students can also, you know, read. If they can't, they're screwed. And, if they can read, you're then hoping that they pick up on the abstract idea buried in the story problems.

There are the falsehoods perpetuated by well-meaning but misguided administration. I read an article in the Chicago Tribune a couple years ago about having to take inner city kids on field trips to farms so they could see what cows look like, amongst other things. This wasn't so that kids had an appreciation for where their foodstuffs came from; it was so that the kids would "know the units of measure" on a mathematical aptitude test, with questions like "if you have 3 cows and 2 are sold, how many do you have left?" If you understand the math concept, the unit doesn't matter--it can be cows, houses, or blabbertigibits, the answer is 1. The teachers and admin in that case didn't grasp the abstract concept of subtraction, and apparently the students didn't either.

Far too many US high school graduates are excited that they finished high school by taking no more than pre-calculus. Congrats, you're on par with an 8th grader in most of the rest of the developed world for mathematical achievement. Being good at math is a particularly stigmatizing form of intelligence; whenever Mr. Griffin is asked his occupation, his response of "math teacher" is invariably met with shudders and choruses of "I hate math." And those people are generally proud of their innumeracy.

Do I think that we need to return to a 19th century education model? No. I think that we should realize that 1) math and math skills are important, and 2) like it or not, math is a field with concrete right and wrong answers. It's dishonest to attempt to teach it otherwise.

Central Coop (aka Madison Market) for it's organic/ethically produced/no bad chemicals approach to groceries. They even recycle batteries.

I'm sure some school districts must have waste and fraud, and I think it's likely that it's the most vulnerable kids who get shafted, since I bet there's less interest/oversight in poorer school districts than wealthier ones.

That said, there are a lot of differences between our school system and school systems that vastly outperform ours.

My Danish cousins were kept in school for normal work hours, say 8 to 5, instead of our 8 to 3 schedule, and throughout the year. Their one-month vacation coincided with their parents'. They also didn't have homework. I'm hardly an expert in school systems across the world, but homework strikes me as a major distinction. American kids don't really learn while they're at school. They're given some amount of guidance and then are sent home with a crap-ton of homework. Kids who don't have stable homes or supportive homes and kids who are quite simply lazy will always fail in that system.

We also don't have the same level of welfare programs that help create stable, supportive homes for children as Scandinavian countries do.

One thing we do have, which many other countries don't, is the opportunity for a do-over. In France, if you don't pass your bac, you aren't going to college. It's not like here, where, even if you didn't graduate high school, you can theoretically come back, get your GED, go to community college, and work your way into a four-year university. Other systems seem to write off under-performing kids pretty early on and don't give them the opportunity to start over, not unless they have the money to study abroad.

"Do you think most school districts in the United States are filled with corruption and wasteful spending/siphoning of funds?"

American public schools are the best in the world and the more money we throw at them, they just keep getting better and better.

Not a business in the strict sense of the word, but Seattle City Light, the utility that provides your electricity is one of the greenest electricity providers in the USA.

The majority of Seattle City Light's power comes from carbon-neutral hydroelectricity. Dams on rivers. It's a well-known fact that one of the downsides to hydropower is the negative impact on salmon runs, but the Skagit River complex owned and operated by City Light is a model of how to build and operate hydro with the least possible impact on fish runs.

Almost a century ago when those dams on the Skagit were first built, the engineers in charge had the foresight to locate them high up enough on the river that their impact on the salmon runs was negligible. Today, City Light's Skagit Dams pump out a large percentage of the power that runs the city of Seattle, and the Skagit boasts some of the healthiest salmon runs on the west coast.

It's worth pointing out that like all utilities, City Light does buy a substantial portion of its power from outside sources. Much of this comes from publicly-owned dams on the Columbia River, that have, sadly, had serious negative consequences for salmon runs. Bonneville Power Administration, the US Army Corps of Engineers and local PUD's have done an impressive job in recent years of integrating salmon preservation into the management of the hydroelectric system; still, they can do better.

No system is perfect. Some of the electricity you use in Seattle came at the price of dead salmon. But, all things being equal, Seattle City Light does a good job of providing low-cost carbon-neutral power, and is bar-none the largest reason that Seattle has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any city in North America.

No, but they're a lightning rod for conservatives because of Teachers' Unions.

I wrestle with this at work. We look at businesses and develop plans to make them greener. "Green, greener, greenest" being the current gradients for marketing purposes. It is necessarily nuanced and no one agrees on what the baseline or ultimate criteria should be.

For instance; should we promote a hotel chain that greatly reduces water use, composts, uses low energy bulbs, etc if that same chain is also known for union busting or other anti-labor practices or if it is, in fact, owned by some massive global conglomerate that is polluting the world? At this point, my answer would be “yes”, but I don’t mean to open another can of worms…

Having said that, my own personal feeling is that one of the most fundamental challenges threatening our environment is the proliferation of synthetic chemicals (whether categorized as toxic or benign). In that light, I think promoting those companies that are in the types of industries that are normally very dependent on chemicals but are instead using safer alternatives is promising..

Examples that pop to mind include cleaning companies like this one: http://sageclean.com/ or landscapers that are integrating non-toxic or minimally toxic practices (like integrated pest management protocols). Info on landscape BMPs can be found here: http://www.seattle.gov/util/Services/Yard/For_Landscape_Professionals/index.asp

I don't think education is any more prone to corruption than other public institutions. The places with rampant corruption in the schools are likely to have the same problems in other governmental agencies. It is the culture of governments, not education.

The best "green" businesses don't need to label themselves as such.

I like materials recyclers-

http://www.yelp.com/biz/second-use-building-materials-seattle
http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-salvage-broker-seattle
http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-re-store-seattle
http://www.yelp.com/biz/earthwise-building-salvage-seattle

PCC Natural Grocery really walks that walk.

Bedrock Industries, under the Magnolia Bridge. They recycle glass into awesome tile, made on the premises. They also have a bunch of rock and other materials left over from various construction projects.

It sounds like you've been listening to Fox News. The wasteful spending that we hear about on the news is really quite rare when you take into account the shear number of school districts all over the country. There are thousands of them, so to take a handful of media hyped examples of and use those as a standard is really quite disingenuous.

Of course not.

School districts are public institutions, with well publicized budgets, public business meetings, overseen by publicly elected officials. As a school district employee my salary as set by my contract was available to anyone that wanted to know it. Nowadays you can commonly look up any school district employee's salary on the internet. Any citizen has the right to knowledge about how the public tax and levy dollars are being spent to serve a community's children.

l grew up in an organization similar to the Peace Corps, and there was a camp here for the kids of that organization where we rode all the way around the Sound in two weeks, did volunteer work, cut trails, did some farming. lt rocked. Since then, they've expanded to include people who aren't necessarily affiliated with the organization, as well as adult trips, father-son, mother-daughter, and various other setups based on location and activities, which are varied. lt's a great group of people. Here's the main page.

I don't know if this would be considered camp because it looks pretty hardcore but Outward Bound has programs for adults as well as kids. 

Me, I'm waaay to busy to write a milquetoast or even negative review. I'd just get right down to it and tell the person what your concerns and criticisms are. Gen Y or not, people need to hear that they're fuck-ups or underperformers. Coddling them just kicks the can down the road. Recommendation letters are just that - not drab, neutral, wishy-washy biographies.

There are a lot of good answers here. Here are my thoughts as someone that works in recruiting:

1. One thought is to ask your HR Department about your actual reference policy. There are many companies, large and small and everything in between, that don't allow their employees to give references because of liability. If your company has such a policy you can simply the telling the underperforming intern that company policy does not allow writing a letter or give her a reference.

2. If your company doesn't have a policy against recommendations/references your best policy, as suggested by some other answers, is honesty; constructive honesty. Make a preemptive strike and schedule a meeting/coaching session with the intern. Give them your opinion of their work, criticize and then give some constructive tips on how she can improve in her next role. This will be honesty, helpful (hopefully) to the intern, and give her the impression that she should not ask you for a letter of recommendation or a reference. Caveat: If you think she is too dull to get the hint after your honest opinion flat out tell her you will be sharing similar feedback on any reference checks.

3. You can write a milquetoast letter that doesn't praise or condemn her. She likely won't share that with anyone and if she does a neutral recommendation won't do her any favors and might be interpreted as a red flag by prospective employers.

If she was that bad, why wasn't she asked not to return?

I think the only cool thing to do if she asks for an LOR is to give her one stating merely that she worked for you this summer and that you wish her luck. If she uses you as a reference, just say that she was an intern for the summer and leave it at that. If questions arise, say that your policy is to only verify length of employment.

You probably know this, but you NEVER give a bad reference for legal reasons. You are perfectly free, however, to give a vague and lackluster one (most people wouldn't ever use that one) - or a great one, if it's applicable.