• Question: What was the hardest thing you had to overcome to get to where you are today?

    Asked by anon-244324 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I actually think one of the hardest things to overcome was myself! Especially at the start of my PhD I had a lot of self-doubt and feelings that I wasn’t good enough to do this job. It took me a while to realise that a lot of people also felt this way and that actually, I was good enough. And now, I love what I do and I’m so glad I stuck with it to get to this point!

    • Photo: Edward Banks

      Edward Banks answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      One of the more difficult things for me was realising that there are many, many different careers that contribute to the progress of science. When you think of scientists, you often just think of people in classrooms/offices scribbling on chalkboards and writing papers (I certainly thought that was the only option!).
      But there are many jobs that support and progress science in so many ways- I eventually found a job as a technician, helping experiments run smoothly and come to fruition.

    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      It’s very difficult to decide what you want to do later in life when you’re 16. There was a period of time at the end of my GCSEs and the beginning of A-Levels where I decided I didn’t care about studying and working hard in school. This lasted about a year, and it meant that my grades were not as good as they could have been. Thankfully, I found something that I started to really enjoy (physics) and realised I would like to do it as a career. This meant I had to work a lot harder to counteract the little work I had done before, but it mostly paid off and here I am!

    • Photo: Ondrej Kovanda

      Ondrej Kovanda answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      For me, the problematic part was myself. At some point, I had to realise that the ‘easy path’ does not lead anywhere, and if I want to become a real scientist, I need to work hard. And by hard I mean very hard! It wouldn’t be possible without a great deal of passion for physics, and without great role models, who were my professors mostly. With a bit of a hindsight, I can now tell that the sooner one realises this, the better.

    • Photo: Christine Beavers

      Christine Beavers answered on 12 Mar 2020:

      Becoming a parent at 18 was a challenge- I was just figuring out how to take care of myself and then I had this whole other little person who needed me to take care of them! This challenge taught me a lot though- how to manage time, how to prioritize and how to work really hard. In high school, to be honest, I was a bit of lazy student- science and math came easy to me, but that meant that I didn’t really have any study skills. Once I was in collge as a parent, I had to work much harder but also more efficiently.

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