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Asked by anon-359713 on 21 Mar 2023.
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Caroline Stone answered on 21 Mar 2023:
Sorry for my delayed reply! I think the qualities that are most important include having perseverence, but also judgement as to which path to take. I think I’m quite good on both points, but sometimes when your experiments aren’t working it’s hard to persevere even though a breakthrough may be just around the corner. On the other hand, if it’s not working out, perhaps you need to change the plan and try a different experiment, so it’s not good to persevere too much! There is definitely a balance.
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Sam Mugford answered on 21 Mar 2023:
I’m a research scientist, and there’s a few skills that are necessary for this. Firstly, there is a lot of knowledge out there in the world and it’s important to have the education that gives the background knowledge for your subject. But it does not stop there, science keeps moving and it’s important to keep up to date with the research that is done in your field of study, so there’s a lot of reading research papers, talking to your colleagues, and going to meetings and seminars to find out what other people are doing.
Secondly, research requires a lot of technical skills, these are different in different areas of study. Most of my work involves molecular biology and biochemistry in the lab. Although a lot of the methods are quite complex, there are always people who can help you learn. Most laboratory methods require a lot of attention to detail. We also use computers a lot to process and analyse the data, so it’s important to have good computing skills. Many of my colleagues have very advanced computing skill and only work at the computer analyzing data, and wouldn’t know how to work a pipette.
I think the most important skill is knowing how to ask the right question. This sounds simple, but it’s something that takes a lot of training. When you’re trying to understand something in nature, and you want to do an experiment to find out how something works, you have to think very hard about exactly what question you are asking and how you can design an experiment that will answer that question. When I studied for my PhD degree I learned a lot of knowledge about my subject, and a lot of technical skills that I still use every day, but the most important thing I learned was how to ask questions about nature. I think you’ve got that skill, this is a great question!
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Phil Howell answered on 21 Mar 2023:
I seem to span different disciplines, and so can translate findings from the lab and see how they fit into the real world where conditions are far from controlled. I have been told that one of my strengths is what I’m doing now – communicating science to non-specialists in a way that they can understand.
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Alexandra Milliken answered on 28 Mar 2023:
I would say curiosity, dedication, determination and resilience are probably the main traits to get you through a PhD. You learn new skills all the time during your studies, so any that you are not confident in you get to practice with. However, a PhD is 3-5 years, experiments can go wrong and it can be hard to pick yourself back up, so you have to be determined to reach your end goal and the more curious you are about the subject you are studying, the easier it can be to get through it.
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