• Question: whats the hardest thing you have had to overcome being a scientist

    Asked by anon-274340 on 15 Dec 2020.
    • Photo: Sarah Smythe

      Sarah Smythe answered on 15 Dec 2020:

      That’s a really interesting question!! I found that the hardest thing is understanding that sometimes you can be wrong! It takes a lot to say it and when experiments go wrong because of it, it is so hard. But once you accept that you can be wrong, it makes such a big difference 🙂

    • Photo: Ashleigh Cheyne

      Ashleigh Cheyne answered on 16 Dec 2020:

      The hardest thing for me was that I’ve struggled to find a good balance between work and life outside of work. In science there’s a lot of pressure to to well and there’s an old fashioned idea that you need to work long hours, in the evenings and weekends, and if you dont produce a lot of data you’re not going to make it in science. That is absolutely NOT TRUE and many people work normal hours and dont produce lots of data and still do well.

      Each person needs to find out how they work best, and for me I need to stop working every day at 5:30pm and take weekends off. It’s just difficult to do that when you feel like everyone else is working more than you (even if they’re not working effectively!).

    • Photo: Jacob Wildfire

      Jacob Wildfire answered on 16 Dec 2020:

      I found it quite hard to accept that the work I do is of good quality. A lot of people, as they progress through their career, start to feel “imposter syndrome”. You feel that you’ve progressed through luck, and that at some point you’ll be found out. It’s a very common feeling, surprisingly!
      But you have to remember the amount of hard work you have put in, have faith in yourself, and remember that even some of the best scientists in the world have felt this way. They are all normal people like you or me.

    • Photo: Amy Rattenbury

      Amy Rattenbury answered on 16 Dec 2020:

      I didn’t do very well in my exams at school and had to resist some. This meant that I didn’t get into the University or the course that I had originally chosen. It was quite upsetting at the time but looking back now it all worked out for the best as I loved the course I did and don’t think I would have ended up doing what I do now without it

    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 17 Dec 2020:

      Being an academic researcher can be really can be challenging as a lot of the time the jobs are only for a couple of years and then you need to move to another university, and usually another city or even country.

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