• Question: What is the hardest part of your job?

    Asked by anon-280398 on 11 Feb 2021. This question was also asked by anon-281057.
    • Photo: Katie West

      Katie West answered on 11 Feb 2021:

      Hi Kaja 🙂

      It can be challenging getting experiments to work properly and frustrating if they go wrong. But usually, it works out ok in the end.

    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 11 Feb 2021:

      Finding the answers when we don’t usually know what the question actually is can make things challenging, but is half the fun. Having to work out why an experiment didn’t work the way you thought it would is probably the most frustrating.

    • Photo: Amelia Gilio

      Amelia Gilio answered on 12 Feb 2021:

      As Katie and Kate have said, when things go wrong and you’re unsure why experiments haven’t worked as you expected, it can be very challenging and confusing but it can also be very satisfying to be able to solve a tricky problem!

    • Photo: Philip Ratcliffe

      Philip Ratcliffe answered on 15 Feb 2021:

      All research is hard in the sense that it’s difficult – by definition you’re doing something (or trying to) that nobody has ever done before. But that’s why it’s fun!
      This is what Nobel Prize winning Richard P. Feynman said about physics:
      “if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.
      See? A real scientist always wants to tackle the hardest problems.

    • Photo: Amal Lavender

      Amal Lavender answered on 22 Feb 2021:

      for me its the juggling act and finding a way to help when there is no obvious solution.

    • Photo: Kat Hunter

      Kat Hunter answered on 26 Feb 2021:

      it would probably be getting used to throwing away a lot of data.
      When doing research you are often learning how to collect data as well as what data you are interested in, learning how to do the experiments better as you go…as you learn what is the most useful to you, you often generate lots of data on the way to this and then realise it’s not useful going forward so it needs to be binned! Not literally though – just put away in a folder.

      It’s a bit like when you do one experiment in class and think about how it could be done better next time – this kind of thing but could be a couple of years worth of work that!

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