Question: why do you enjoy being a scientist? Have you ever thought of quitting?

David McGonigle answered on 4 Mar 2021:

Oof! Tough question, Olivia! Why do I enjoy being a scientist? Like most jobs, I suppose I have to admit that sometimes, well, there are times when yeah, I don’t enjoy it. It can be frustrating – just recently, my Ph.D. student and I were running a really complicated experiment – no-one else had ever tried to combine the different brain scanning and brain stimulation equipment in this way. So I thought we were on to a winner! We’d find out something new! Woohoo!
And…nope. Perhaps there was a reason no-one else had done this – because to finish an experiment on just one person would take roughly 4 hours (2 hours set up, 1-hour scanning, 1 hour preparing for the next person!). It was tough work with just the two of us, but we got it done: only to find that something had gone wrong with one of our machines, and all the data was unusable. At that point, I felt utterly defeated…
But we picked ourselves up and got on with re-designing things and eventually got all the data we wanted.
That, in a nutshell, is the life of a scientist. If you’re a genius – great! – you’ll sail through publishing papers, getting grants (money to fund your experiments), and being invited to talk at conferences. For a lot of us – myself absolutely included! – we’re not geniuses, and getting rejections – papers not published, grants not awarded – can feel pretty depressing at times. It’s at those times that I think ‘there has to be an easier way to make a living!’…but then I remember cool experiments I’ve done, interesting people that I’ve met, new ideas and new ways to hopefully understand the brain…
It’s these things that make me get up in the morning, and so I guess I’ll be a neuroscientist forever. I wonder, though, what made you ask this: were you thinking of taking a science subject at uni?