• Question: Whats the most fun thing about your job

    Asked by Jupiter to Pete, Senga, James, Jake, Simonne on 6 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by sunny, Diglett78, Zofia.D., 865putk32.
    • Photo: Pete Gwynne

      Pete Gwynne answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      i like being practical and working with my hands so i enjoy doing the experiments. once you’ve practiced a few times a lot of it isn’t super difficult, so you can get some music on and just work through the steps, like following a recipe. my favourite days are the ones where you’ve got a long experiment to do and you don’t have to spend too much time reading or writing on the computer.

    • Photo: Senga Robertson

      Senga Robertson answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Hi!

      For me, because I worked as a complaint manager for a big company when I was at university (I pretty much got paid for people to shout at me) I find almost everything about being a scientist really fun. Having the freedom to investigate things by doing experiments, telling people in conferences (and even just over a cup of tea) about the cool things you’ve discovered is brilliant.

      There are 2 things about my job that I find the most fun though. The first is the people I work with, most of them are just as weird and funny as me, there’s always an amazing energy in the lab and the second is getting the opportunity to do really fun activities and events with people like you. I do a lot of different science activities with all sorts of people and everyone always has an amazing time. It’s the best feeling ever.

      One of the things I don’t like so much though is writing science papers, it takes quite a long time and you need to use really boring, technical science words and terms…I prefer to just say something normally. For example, I would say “bacteria in the soil around roots are different depending on if the root has hairs or not”…in science terms I need to say “Root Hair Mutations Displace the Rhizosphere Microbiota”…I think using that sort of wording can make science papers hard for people that aren’t scientists to understand what we are talking about and I think that science should be available for everyone to read and be able to understand, not written in some special “science language”.

      Oh I went on a little rant there didn’t I? ha ha

      Bottom line…I love almost everything about my job.

      Senga 🙂

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