anything you wish you have known before

Question: anything you wish you have known before
- Keywords:
  advice,
  experience
Asked by anon-285641 on 4 Mar 2021.
- Marjorie Pichon answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  No decision is forever! You can try one job, and if you don’t like it you can try something else next. 🙂
- Anon answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  I wish I had known in school that there are lots of ways to be clever / intelligent.
  
  The psychologist Howard Gardner said that there are many ways to be intelligent. Here are some of them:
  
  Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence – moving your body.
  
  Interpersonal intelligence – understanding other people.
  
  Intrapersonal intelligence – understanding yourself.
  
  Musical intelligence – understanding music.
  
  Naturalistic intelligence – understanding nature.
  
  Spatial intelligence- imagining shapes, drawing and finding your way around.
  
  Linguistic intelligence – expressing yourself and understanding language.
  
  Logical-mathematical intelligence – understanding numbers and solving problems.
- Lisa Orchard answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  I wish I had known that it is OK to make mistakes or not know all the answers. I’ve always been such a perfectionist, but science is all about learning from what went wrong and questionning how to make it better next time.
- Christina Brown answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  I wish I knew I should ask questions, even if I thought they were dumb. Scientists love to explain things so if you don’t understand them, they can’t wait to go into it.
  Also if you don’t understand something in a research paper, it’s just as likely it’s not been written clearly enough and it’s not your fault.
- Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 4 Mar 2021: last edited 4 Mar 2021 12:08 pm
  
  I wish I knew how to be more confident when I was younger. That would have enabled me to launch my blog and YouTube channel a little earlier. The younger me was too afraid of criticisms; full of self-doubt and less articulate. Now that I’m older, I already know – from experience – that not all criticisms are constructive.
- Alex Baxendale answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  Mistakes are okay, and you’re not expected to know everything in the world. If you don’t know an answer, you can say “I don’t know” and there is nothing wrong with that – we’re all human!
- anon answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  Hi NiyahC,
  This is an interesting one for me!
  I was at a high-ranking university and was taught by PhD students for my statistics module as a first-year undergraduate student. I really struggled to grasp the concepts and coming from a ‘big fish small pond’ type of school it really knocked my confidence. I thought being PhD students teaching me they would know their stuff and that my inability was a reflection on being horrendous at statistics!
  But now being a PhD student teaching that exactly the same module, I have come to the conclusion that being a PhD student, no matter how prestigious the university, it doesn’t mean they are automatically good at teaching and thus any failures are not necessarily internal (being bad at a subject) but external (the teaching is poor).
  So what I wish I had known before? Don’t give up, you’ve got this.
- Gwen Brekelmans answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  Great question! I would say that it’s okay to not know what you want to do quite yet, as you can keep learning things and change what you are doing after. There’s many ways to get to a thing you might like to do 🙂 I found it really hard to decide what I wanted to do after my A levels (I looked at so many different degrees, from computer science and physics to music and English!) and in the end decided on English. But then once I was at university I came across other interesting things, and moved on to Linguistics and then Psychology for my PhD. Turns out, I’m now doing things that I also could have done with computer science or physics as an university choice, so regardless of what choice I had made I think in the end I would have ended up with the things I liked to do in the end 🙂
- anon answered on 4 Mar 2021:
  
  That it’s OK to not know the answer – whether that is choosing a long-term career in your teens, or answering your questions in the group chat! I used to get quite bogged down worrying if I had made the right decision, or if I knew the right answer, and it held me back a lot. It is OK to plan and consider things, but don’t let it hold you back from trying something out. We are always learning and always growing – I’m actually enjoying reading the other scientists’ answers on here and hearing their views on things, and learning about all of our different journeys to get here.
- Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:
  
  I wish I’d know mistakes are ok, no one is perfect! Most importantly, I wish I had learnt earlier to actually look after myself! Take breaks and keep up with your hobbies!
- Ellen Smith answered on 5 Mar 2021:
  
  That it’s ok to take breaks and do things that you enjoy, you don’t have to be constantly working. There will be some days where your motivation is really low and often you’ll find that taking a break and coming back to it really helps.

Question: anything you wish you have known before

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