Question: what is it like being a professional scientist?

Angela Stokes answered on 8 Nov 2014:

Hey kx 100

That’s a difficult question to answer.

I can tell you how I find being a professional scientist in my field which is pharmaceuticals……

It is exciting and challenging at the same time. Every day presents new problems for me to find answers to – sometimes it is frustrating but above all, because my job is one where I have a final product, a medicine, that can make a real difference to peoples lives, it is not only financially rewarding but personally fulfilling and makes me want to get up in the morning. Personally I would not want to do anything else!

If you want to know what a typical day is like for me it is something like this…although as I have already said every day is different…..

I will either drive to my office, or if I am working from home I will make a cup of tea and walk upstairs to my home office. My first job is to check my emails. As I work in a global business these could come from anywhere in the world. I get about 100 emails a day so usually have around 15-20 emails to read and answer before 9am. I may then have some UK based teleconferences or meetings if I am in the office or I may have a teleconference with Japan. These could be anything from a meeting with a colleague to discuss the strategy for a new drug, or could be meeting with senior management to let them know how a submission is proceeding. At noon the International Project Team meetings begin. These generally include people from UK, USA and Japan and being in the UK , I am lucky as my Japanese colleagues have to stay very late in the office and my US colleagues have to come in very early, I usually miss lunch but as it is only about once or twice a week it is not a problem. These meeting discuss multi million dollar clinical programmes to get medicines on the market and so they are very important – getting the licencing strategy right is my job and my teams rely on me to give good up to date advice. My afternoons could be filled with meetings with USA colleagues or actually writing documents for meetings with world wide health authorities, answering their questions or writing submissions to ask for permission to run a clinical trial. Alternatively I could be discussing travel arrangements with my secretary or working on non-project related items such as improving processes or just answering emails and setting up more meetings. As I said no two days are the same. I generally finish between 6 and 7pm, but some days I can finish as early as 3pm as my company is very flexible so my hours generally work out so I can have a good work-life balance.

I hope this gives you an idea of what my day is like, of course I could be away on business, gathering information at a conference, speaking at a conference or meeting with a health authority in which case my day would be completely different! But the one thing is – whatever I am doing that day I really do enjoy it!