• Question: What do you do everyday? Are you always experimenting or do you sometimes do other things?

    Asked by anon-247481 to Baptiste, Ben, Dan, Jennifer, Martha on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Jennifer Carroll

      Jennifer Carroll answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      In my current job I don’t do any experiments, if I make a modification to the plant it has to work because the country needs electricity and the power station needs to be operating to do that.

      Day to day, I split my time between meetings and design work.
      The meetings help me secure the money to pay for the changes and upgrades to equipment. I need to explain why my project deserves to be funded, what the benefits are and a panel of people will decide if my project will go ahead over another project.

      When I’m not getting money for projects, I am spending the money. I do my designs, write the safety justification to say why it is safe to make the change which is checked my colleagues and then I work with the team of trades people (mechanical fitters, electricians, etc) who physically make the changes to the plant. This is the hard part because things don’t always go to plan, but it is exciting to get to work reactively and solve problems quickly, as they arise.

      It is so satisfying to see my ideas go from drawings on a page to a physical thing!

    • Photo: Ben Rowsell

      Ben Rowsell answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Because I am a PhD student my time is mainly spent experimenting for my research, but I fit in other things as well. I spend time doing outreach and lab demonstrating so school pupils can actually see what it’s like in the life of a chemist. We also have some meetings where we present our work to other people. One of the best things about being in research is that you get to go to conferences which are often big international ones and are abroad. This is great excuse to travel but also to see what other great work scientists are doing around the world.

    • Photo: Dan Brunsdon

      Dan Brunsdon answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      My daily work depends on how far through the research project we are. If we are at the start, then I will be involved in all the planning and preparation work that goes into working abroad in remote areas. This is mainly work at a desk which is less than fun. But then on the flip side once I am on fieldwork my day is incredibly varied. It will change depending on what we are studying, but it usually involves talking to a lot of people and managing all of the data we are gathering. At times like this I can hardly ever be at a desk.

      If we’re at the analysis stage of our research, then I will need to go through all of the data we have, organise our approach into stages and provide updates to the rest of the team as I work through it. This can all get a bit intense sometimes, so I mix up my day with other work I can be doing. This could be writing up a paper, researching relevant articles online, or preparing presentations for conferences.

    • Photo: Martha Jesson

      Martha Jesson answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      My day can be pretty varied as I am involved in a lot of research projects. For example, I am looking into children and young people’s mental health, digital technology in healthcare and the impact of having multiple long term conditons. But my organisation like to balance work and wellbeing, so we often spend some down time chatting and indulging in chocolate haha

    • Photo: Baptiste Ravina

      Baptiste Ravina answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I spend a lot of time working on my computer, as it allows me to do so many things: have video chats with my colleagues to talk about our latest work, monitor the behaviour of various components of the Large Hadron Collider (the proton smasher I work on) remotely, read about the latest advances in my field, write computer code to perform data analysis on my proton collisions, prepare my notes for my next teaching class, and of course answer all sorts of questions from curious students 🙂

      Some days I’ll work on my own, others in a small group. I’ll travel on average once a month, either to our main lab in Geneva, Switzerland; or across Europe for meetings. I spend a lot of time surrounded by experts in various fields, so I find teaching and communicating with the general public very rewarding and a nice change from all the technical talk.

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