• Question: how old do you have to be to become a scientest

    Asked by anon-234734 to Stuart, Scott, Lisa, Jack, Caragh, Alex on 12 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Caragh Whitehead

      Caragh Whitehead answered on 12 Nov 2019:

      You can become a scientist at any age. There are lots of project that you can find about online that look for people of all ages to help them. Here is a good link to read more about it (maybe ask your teacher for help) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BZZdHm64S051q2lnZ1Nr7p/citizen-science

      To have a job as a scientist you need to do a university degree which will take you 3 or 4 years after you have completed your A levels. So you will be about around 21 years old.

    • Photo: Jack Saunders

      Jack Saunders answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      I agree with Caragh, there’s lots of science you can do at any age!

      There are some science jobs that you don’t need a university degree to do, but most of them require one, like Caragh said.
      There are also some science jobs that need two degrees to do them! This means that you could be 25 or 26 before you get a science job and stop being taught 🙂

      Here is another website with a fun thing to do that will help scientists looking after birds and other garden wildlife.
      https://www.rspb.org.uk/fun-and-learning/for-families/family-wild-challenge/activities/do-a-wildlife-survey/

    • Photo: Alex Batchelor

      Alex Batchelor answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      I can’t answer this any better than Caragh and Jack have but I want to add that I know scientists who have run projects like the ones they put links to and having people interested and helping them is really important! It helps the scientist get a lot more results than they could ever do on their own so if you’re interested you should definitely check out those links!

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