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Asked by anon-286291 on 5 Mar 2021.
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Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:
This is a really hard question to answer! There are certainly aspects of the job which are hard (reading all the literature, sometimes stats) but there are also parts that are really rewarding (talking to awesome people like you!)! I think it balances itself out – with anything there are easier and harder parts and we navigate our way through it 🙂
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Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 5 Mar 2021: last edited 5 Mar 2021 4:35 pm
It’s time-consuming but I wouldn’t say hard. It’s not hard because I enjoy the blend of things my job involves – from publishing articles to organsing conferences, to creating YouTube videos, and writing for a newspaper. Juggling these roles, along with my personal life and my PhD, taught me the value of focus and time management. But, of course, we’re more than just our ‘hard jobs’, that’s why my weekends are sacred – I spend it with my hubsband and on our garden (which is my slice of paradise).
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Alex Baxendale answered on 5 Mar 2021:
There are some parts that can feel difficult, we constantly have to keep on top of all of the new science coming out in our area so that we are up to date on everything, and learning statistics (math) is definitely a pain! But, after doing it for a while it gets easier, only so much science comes out every month and when you’re on top of everything it starts to settle down. So it’s a bit of a climb at the start but once you’ve got your footing it’s really not bad at all! I definitely don’t regret doing it
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Ellen Smith answered on 5 Mar 2021:
Yes and no. The day-to-day running of intervention studies that I do for my PhD, isn’t difficult at all (once you’ve learnt the skills you need, like taking bloods and setting up equipment), but it is really time consuming and a big part of my job. The most challenging parts is analysing the data that you collect, trying to understand what it means and then writing it up in a scientific style. At the moment I’m writing up my thesis and parts of that are really difficult to write, you have to read a lot of scientific papers which can be hard to understand too.
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anon answered on 6 Mar 2021: last edited 6 Mar 2021 1:41 pm
Hi WilliamC,
I think that depends how you define hard. Personally, I can separate into direct and indirect measures of difficulty.
So for direct measures, things like stress of running experiments, when tests go wrong, when your computer crashes whilst running data analysis and all the hard perks that come with being a PhD student!
Then there is the indirect difficulties that make my job hard. Doing a PhD is a lonely process. It is literally just me doing the research. This is very different at undergradute, where you are often one in the 100s doing the subject, even at school you are never alone. Another indirect difficulty is managing ‘imposter syndrome’. This is where you feel like you got into your PhD on a mistake – you go through a lot of your academic life feeling like a fraud. That’s pretty hard to deal with.
Finally, I think the toll it takes on mental health for a combination of the reasons above also makes the job hard. But… life doesn’t come without stress or hardship, and for every day I find my job hard, I have two days where it is the best thing I have ever done! -
Lisa Orchard answered on 8 Mar 2021:
Hi William. It is hard, but I would say worth it! For me the hardest part is that there is always more work to do – you can never tick off everything on your to do list by the end of the day. There’s always so much to do and sometimes it can be incredibly overwhelming. I think the more you do the job, the easier it becomes. You find ways of managing workloads, and prioritising different tasks.
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Christina Brown answered on 8 Mar 2021:
I would say that it’s hard because a lot of plates are being juggled during the day to day of being an academic scientist. My job is technically pretty difficult – I need to perform surgery on small mice to determine what areas in the brain are involved in forming emotional memories. I need to be very patient to then record from single brain cells to see how they activate upon electrical stimulation. There is a lot of fine tuning that needs to be done and sometimes you can’t do your experiment until you spend a whole day troubleshooting why there’s electrical noise in your set up. Despite this, it’s usually worth it and you feel really proud once it’s been fixed.
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