• Question: How did you become interested in your jobs ???

    Asked by drwhoogeek to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      During my A-levels I new I wanted to do something medicine-like, but couldn’t see myself as a doctor wandering around a hospital. So instead I ended up doing research into something which will hopefully produce new medicines in the future. I didn’t decide exactly what I wanted to do until after university when I looked round for a PhD and the most interesting one available was studying schizophrenia, which I have been studying ever since!

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      For me, I loved science fiction (still do) and there was a particularly good book by Robert Heinlein called “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” My favorite character was Mike (the computer) and I totally wanted to talk to a computer like Mike.

      So when I did computing at Uni, I studied artificial intelligence and was sadly disappointed — 50 years and there have been so few successes. That got me interested in why computers were so rubbish in all the things that people do so automatically and I started studying the biology and realized that brains are pretty cool.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      For my current job I was attracted to the research questions in the laboratory where I work, and also I applied for a Fellowship (a grant which pays my salary) because it provided me with the opportunity to train in new techniques.

      And here is a reply to a similar question:

      I enjoyed Natural Sciences while studying at school, and during my degree in Biology I became very interested in the function of neurons (such as those in the brain or the one that control our muscles). And of course one of the most exciting things that neurons in the brain do is to store memories. Then I realised that there is still a lot to discover in this area of science, so that’s how I chose the topics that I am researching about.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      I became interested in speech and the brain during my undergraduate degree when I took a module in psychology. I loved thinking about how people think, and found that i was much better at this than learning off biochemical pathways! I did some work experience in a language lab, and a final-year project looking at how learn to adjust to speech that is distorted. I still had lots of ideas for future research so I decided to get more work experience and apply to do a PhD…and the rest followed from there.

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