• Question: What is your favourite thing about being a scientist?

    Asked by anon-268302 on 10 Nov 2020. This question was also asked by anon-269992, anon-269921, anon-270715, anon-270581.
    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 10 Nov 2020:

      Ooh, this is a tough one! I think for me my favourite thing is being able to make new discoveries about the world around me alongside other scientists (I really like how science is so collaborative).

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 10 Nov 2020:

      There are lots of really fun things about being a scientist… it’s hard to pick one 🙂
      .
      I really like solving interesting problems and working on my own projects with my peers. We don’t have a boss telling us what to do; we just ask each other questions and try to answer them together. It can be very welcoming and quite fun.
      .
      But my favorite is probably that I don’t have to get up at 8 am to go to work, and I get to travel the world to go to different universities and conferences. As a scientist, you have to travel lots! 🙂

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 10 Nov 2020:

      I like learning new things. Today, I used pen and paper maths to learn something that nobody else has learned about how space works – and today we can also do much more complicated things with big computers, like making whole universes of galaxies. But I also like the people – I’ve met a lot of friends working together on projects, and teaching new generations of scientists is very rewarding. I also like making people laugh when I put silly gifs in my talks (like https://imgur.com/r/Thinking/X3IWMML). I don’t like writing up my work or writing job applications, but these are important so I still have to do them. I also like visiting new places since science is a worldwide thing – I’ve been to Korea and the USA with work. But I don’t like travelling, it’s tiring getting from A to B. I much prefer trains to planes, too. They now have fast direct trains from Amsterdam to London, and I can’t wait to try them when covid is over.

    • Photo: Jesse Dykes

      Jesse Dykes answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      The best part of being a scientist is seeing and doing things that nobody else has ever done before. Ever. Once, as part of an experiment, we accidentally created a type of material, which was completely unexpected and it turns out nobody else had done it this way before

Comments

  • Photo: Samantha

    Samantha commented on :

    I like finding out new things, either learning something new to me, or developing something new. I particularly love it when I know that what I’m doing will be of real use to improving people’s health. And I love having the chance to talk to people about science – and hopefully inspire some of them!