• Question: What is the best thing about being a Scientist?

    Asked by aliceb to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by charlie42, cameron5, libbyhobson, olliep, pollystyrene, georges, hughes, 1152connorspruce, carrots7000, funkymonkey, sophiej, howmayer1, livyad, cartridge98, superscience, emmam.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      Being a scientist is great because if you are curious about something, and nobody else knows the answer to it, you get paid to go and find out about it. You can do whatever experiments you like that will help you solve the problem, and really spend your time doing things you are actually interested in.

      When you’ve done it, and you get to tell everyone about it, that’s great too, because you can get them interested about stuff that noone knew about until you did it. Hopefully, they’ll say ‘Wow!’ and be inspired to do science themselves!

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      Getting paid to find out about something that you think is really interesting!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      When you’re being taught to be a scientist (at school and university), you’re told what you’re allowed to learn and generally how to do it. Every so often you get a bit of freedom to do something you want to do, maybe for a project or something like that.

      But it’s all worth it when you’re given free reign and can go and search out whatever you find interesting that you can read about or do experiments on without anyone telling you not to!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Being paid to work on what I think is interesting anyway. 🙂

      I also really like talking to other people about my job – most people have a question about astronomy they’d like to ask, even if it’s just “what was that bright thing in the sky last night?” That’s fun. 🙂

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