• Question: whats it like being a scientist

    Asked by liampm to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by poisen2, tobyjh, tammy1999, cerys, robertairdrie9924.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      It’s great!

      Being able to work on something that you are really interested in or curious about is a big bonus, because it means that you get up every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like work, because it is the sort of thing you would want to be doing anyway!

      There’s not really a typical day, because I can decide whether I want to look at my fossils down a microscope, or write up my latest results, or make a contraption for my next experiment – it’s really flexible. Plus, you get to work with all sorts of other scientists who work on different things. Talking to them and sharing ideas can be fun and really helpful. There’s not such thing as cheating when you’re a scientist – it’s called collaboration!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      There’s lots of great things about it, which I’m sure other people will talk about. But there’s bad things too. Scientists that you might work with can often be a… funny bunch. There’s more politics in science than you might realise. Often bureaucracy means things take ages to get done…

      Saying that, I love it. You’re given the freedom that you never got doing science at school or on a degree. So I can look at whatever I want (within reason). If I don’t find something interesting, I don’t need to do it, unless my supervisor tells me to!

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      Right now we (me & some colleagues) are in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in the middle of the night, on top of an extinct volcano, firing a very big laser into the sky, from a huge telescope, to measure the twinkling of the stars. (And we are drinking lots of tea.)

      So it is fun, you get interesting problems and different questions to solve almost every-day, and the best bit is when you discover something for the first time—especially when you have predicted it using some maths.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      Some days it’s the best job in the world. When my experiments work, when I find something new – it can be really rewarding and exciting. Of course there are lots of days when things don’t work which can be very frustrating. It’s ok though because everyone else I work with has days like this too so we can talk to each other and try and help each other out when we get stuck. The most exciting bits of my job are doing field work in exciting places. When you see your experiment launch (an experiment I work on launched on a stratospheric balloon two years ago) it makes all the long hours, hard work and frustration worth it.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      It’s great. I enjoy working on the things I am interested in.

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