• Question: what made you choose your job

    Asked by anon-285465 on 4 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-284168, anon-286148, anon-286149, anon-286224, anon-286140, anon-286291, anon-286523, anon-287293.
    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 4 Mar 2021: last edited 4 Mar 2021 4:04 pm

      My main job is running my own small company, where I employ five people. I manage a psychology website and I organise psychology conferences. What made me do it? Because I don’t want to work for anyone; I want to be the captain of my own ship. I want the challenge of starting small and then gradually turning into something valuable. Challenges drive me: that’s what made choose my job.

    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      I want to make a difference! Research allows me to find out answers to questions nobody has answered before, and the things I find out can be used by other people around the world to create new ideas. Eventually, enough information has been found out by researchers that we can do something practical with it. For example, my work in to math anxiety can lead to an intervention – which is a treatment that we can give to people with math anxiety so that they can overcome their fears, and do better!

    • Photo: Ellen Smith

      Ellen Smith answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      I’ve always been interested in food/cooking so I picked option modules that focussed on nutritional psychology during my undergraduate degree. I was also able to intern in the research lab that I currently work in, from my second year. During this I ran my own intervention trials but also worked on large industrial trials, so I really got to learn what the job was and how to do it. I knew from then that it was what I wanted to do.

    • Photo: Lisa Orchard

      Lisa Orchard answered on 9 Mar 2021:

      I was really unsure what I wanted to do when I left university. I saw a job advert for a psychology teaching assistant at university, and I just thought to myself “This is something I could do and that I would enjoy”. I didn’t really have a long term plan at this point – I just knew that I had always enjoyed talking to people, and I had considered teaching before so I just went with it. And I loved it! 🙂

    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 9 Mar 2021:

      It is a chance to make a difference! When I was doing my undergraduate degree I knew I wanted to carry on doing research and lecturing. So, when I was coming to the end I was also sending out applications for postgraduate degrees so I could do my masters. I came up with new ideas, some were quite similar t where I had set my interests and others (including what I do now) were quite different, but still something I loved. When I was accepted for my masters, I started looking at PhD funding and because others could see the value in it, I knew it could be even bigger and better than I though!

    • Photo: Amrita Bains

      Amrita Bains answered on 10 Mar 2021:

      This is a great question! To be honest for me I didn’t realise this would be the job I end up in! When I went to university and was able to do my own research for my dissertation I really enjoyed it, being able to decide what kind of question I wanted to explore and also to be able to work with some really cool lecturers. I really enjoyed creating an experiment and then coming to analyse the data to find out the answer! Also, after doing a PhD there are many different routes you can explore you can stay in academia doing research or you can even leave and become a data analyst for a company or do work for even parliament examining research which has been conducted and relaying it back out to the public

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 25 Mar 2021:

      Hi,
      The main reason I chose my PhD project was the supervisor and here research areas. It is so important to have a good relationship with your supervisor and be interested in their research – a PhD is a very long process and motivation and support are fundamental.

Comments