• Question: how does you job affect your everyday life?

    Asked by 466cmtm28 to Aileen, Christopher, Rehemat, Stephanie, Stephen on 14 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Aileen Baird

      Aileen Baird answered on 14 Mar 2018:


      Being a scientist can affect your everyday life in some ways! I think some positive things is that you are more aware of things going on around you. For example, I feel like I notice fungi and interesting plants whenever I walk into university which I don’t know if I would as much. Being a scientist also means that you can be good at planning ahead and also having good attention to detail which are good things for life in general!

      However there can be bad things too. Being a scientist in a university means that I don’t have fixed hours that I have to be in work, which can mean that it is easy to work very long hours and not see your friends and family as much. There is a lot of work to do, and it can be difficult to stop thinking about science all the time! I try to be quite disciplined and make sure I still have hobbies, friends and see my family because otherwise it is easy to get very stressed. Although I love my job, I also like other things that aren’t science so it is important not to forget them too.

    • Photo: Stephanie Mann

      Stephanie Mann answered on 14 Mar 2018:


      My job can be very different each day. Usually I go into the office before 9, do some research, answer emails, have meetings, then home before 6. Other days it can have more of an effect on me because I’ll be travelling early in the day, or going out to visit offshore wind turbines. On those days I need to be more prepared to do something a bit more fun than being in the office!

    • Photo: Christopher Nankervis

      Christopher Nankervis answered on 14 Mar 2018:


      Doing a PhD in the Atmospheric Sciences made me think about solving challenges completely differently. For most of younger life, studying science was always very neat and tidy. Experiments were made for me that worked! When I started designing my own experiments and my own methods lots of things did not work. I found out that science is messy, and results are not easy to understand. Science is much more difficult than plotting a simple graph for my results.

    • Photo: Stephen Twomlow

      Stephen Twomlow answered on 15 Mar 2018:


      Better to ask my family than me – I probably 2 weeks a month away for 10 months of the year. I try my best not to miss birthdays and celebrations but does not always work

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