• Question: In science, what do you find the most difficult thing you have had to conquer? How did you conquer these problems?

    Asked by to Ben, Emily, Hattie, Jemma, Veronica on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Harriet Aitken

      Harriet Aitken answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hi Diamondstar,

      Great question, for me I would say it is the uncertainty of research – there is no 100% right answer in research and there will always be something you can improve upon or something else you can try. It can be quite tiring and I find it hard to switch off, but everyday there is a new challenge and always a chance to better yourself so it keeps me on my toes 🙂

      Hattie

    • Photo: Jemma Rowlandson

      Jemma Rowlandson answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hello!

      Ooh, tough one. Probably knowing if my measurements are right! My materials contain lots of tiny holes, and it’s important they’re the right size. The problem is they are so tiny that you cannot see them even with a powerful microscope.

      Instead I have to measure them using lots of different methods. Every method I use though makes a couple of educated guesses about what my sample looks like. These guesses are not always correct which means the answer I get may be wrong.

      I get around this by using as many different methods as I can and then comparing the answers. If they are similar then I know my answer must be accurate!

    • Photo: Emily Hayward

      Emily Hayward answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Great question diamondstar!

      This is a really tough question to answer! For me its possibly working with an old supervisor as we had very different attitudes to work and how things were done. I had done some work and got some results which werent what we expected…..my idea was to repeat it and see what happened and come up with an explanation if it was wrong, whereas she didnt believe the results could be true so we repeated it, and changed lots of different things to try to make what we’d originally been trying to. Finally we managed to come up with an explanation about what was happening…..if I’d done things as I wanted to the project would have been completed much quicker but sometimes you have to respect those who supervise you and do what they want you to be working on, I guess this is probably one of the toughest things I’ve had to do as it would have been easy to not listen to her and do things my way, but when someone is supervising you you need to respect them…..its hard when someone makes you out to be stupid when actually they are making the mistake but you need to be able to work well with others and respect them, even when you dont want to as a lot of science is about collaboration and sharing ideas with one another to progress forward together.

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