• Question: What is your least favourite thing about being a scientist?

    Asked by anon-192920 to Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma, Carl on 7 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 7 Nov 2018:


      My least favourite thing about being a scientist is probably the time that it takes to make new discoveries and find out how and why things happen the way that they do. When I first started to work in scientific research (2015), I thought I was just really bad at science because everything was taking ages – but now I know that science just takes a long time. I’m more comfortable with that not but sometimes it’s still annoying because I can be impatient – I just try to remember that important studies and new discoveries take time because we’re discovering something new!

    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 7 Nov 2018:


      My least favorite thing is probably the administrative tasks that come with my role. As the clinical trial industry is heavily regulated we have to maintain a lot of documentation as evidence of what was planned for a study, what was performed for various different steps and tasks. I enjoying playing around with the data and performing the analyses but then the writing up of what I did – not so much! I always much preferred Maths to English!

    • Photo: Iain Staniland

      Iain Staniland answered on 7 Nov 2018:


      I am with Emma on this.
      It is all the forms and meetings and emails I have to complete in order to do my science.
      It seems there are always forms to fill in, emails to answer and dull meetings about dull things to attend (like should there be a kettle in the canteen, or where to store all the equipment, how high your desk should be).

      I know this are to help everyone and make sure the workplace is safe and well run but you can understand it is not as much fun as actually making discoveries and working with the animals.

    • Photo: Carl Heron

      Carl Heron answered on 8 Nov 2018:


      Many hardworking, early career (usually young) scientists are on short-term contracts. When their funding runs out, the choices are challenging and some have to change career in order to get by. Personally, I would increase the science budget to retain more early career scientists. We will all reap the benefits.

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