Question: How hard is your job?

Tom Dally answered on 16 Mar 2020: last edited 16 Mar 2020 10:34 pm

It depends what I’m doing, really. I’m employed as a research fellow on a grant (an amount of money given to a researcher – my boss – to carry out a specific bit of research). Which means that my job is essentially to make sure that the research project we’re running is running smoothly. Sometimes this is admin work: health and safety, risk assessments, and organising meetings etc., but the rest of the time I’m helping design and run experiments, analysing data, and making science happen! It can be really challenging, because I don’t always know how to do everything that I’m meant to be doing, but science (and being a scientist) is all about learning. The hardest bits are when experiments don’t work out the way you thought they might. When this happens, you just have to take a step back and recognise that you aren’t in control of the way the world works!