• Question: why didnt you do a career on something else?

    Asked by hannahlittleee to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by jamieg.
    • Photo: Roy Adkin

      Roy Adkin answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hi Hannah,
      The simple answer is I just didn’t want to do anything else. I had lots of fun travelling around the world and entertaining people but I always wanted to be a scientist…I knew I would never want to do anything else. There is no other career I would want to do. 🙂

    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I still might. The skills that learning science gives you mean you can go on and try lots of other things.

      My other main interest was writing novels, but I didn’t think a degree would make much of a difference to that and I wanted to keep learning so I decided to do science, which would allow me to get a steady job to support my writing if I continued with that.

      I am now a climbing instructor and I am continuing to learn more about instructing and taking more advanced instruction qualifications so I can build a career in climbing either as a part-time job like it is now or full time if I changed my mind and left science. By the way, it’s astonishing how many chemists are climbers – both are good problem-solving subjects!

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I have had quite a few jobs alongside my studies and work, some administrative, some teaching, some telephone work, some working in a lab in industry (which is quite different to one in university) I even took a year out to get my PGCE, but that one year when I wasn’t doing research I missed it terribly and realised there is nothing else I would rather be doing.
      No normal person would look at the mug of hot chocolate they had just made, and think ‘Oooo, look – the fat from the chocolate is crystallising at the surface, that would be a really cool thing to look at on my x-Ray machine at work and see if it is doing the same thing as the ones that guy spoke about at conference, maybe I should lookup his paper’ That sort of thinking should have me locked up in a lab or a mental ward for a long time yet 😉

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I never really thought about careers too much when I chose to do Chemistry at Uni – I just decided to follow what I enjoyed and what I was good at – and that was definitely the sciences.

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