• Question: What is the hardest thing about being a scientist?

    Asked by anon-314133 on 10 Mar 2022.
    • Photo: Mary Clarke

      Mary Clarke answered on 10 Mar 2022:

      Getting money to do the research 🙁

    • Photo: Amy Worrall

      Amy Worrall answered on 10 Mar 2022:

      Dealing with failure- a lot of things just won’t work and you need to be ready to pick yourself up and try a new angle!

    • Photo: Emily Clarke

      Emily Clarke answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      Dealing with things going wrong. It definitely makes you more resilient.

    • Photo: Elpida Vounzoulaki

      Elpida Vounzoulaki answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      That sometimes you don’t have an answer to everything, or your experiments/code fail. I am lucky to work as part of a very supportive team though! 🙂

    • Photo: Sophie Langdon

      Sophie Langdon answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      When things don’t work/go wrong and you can’t work out why! It can be very frustrating and you can spend a long time trying to fix it. Ultimately though, sometimes in science things just don’t work so you have to leave it and move on which doesn’t always feel great.

      Also if you work in academia funding is a real issue as @Mary has said!

    • Photo: Chigozie Onuba

      Chigozie Onuba answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      I don’t think there’s anything hard. Just have to be prepared to study and work hard

    • Photo: Kerry Ann Brown

      Kerry Ann Brown answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Perseverance and transparency! Science requires a systematic approach to collecting information and analysing/interpreting that information. It can take patience and a commitment to do things correctly and keep good notes so everyone can see what was done and why. If you are in a hurry this can be hard. It is worthwhile though to protect anyone who has taken part in our research and also to make sure we can trust our results!

    • Photo: Sara Luzzi

      Sara Luzzi answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Dealing with rejections and failed experiments is probably the hardest one, but every job has stumbling blocks and some risk of failure. If you like what you do, and if you have help from others, even the hardest thing can become manageable.

    • Photo: Rebecca Locke

      Rebecca Locke answered on 16 Mar 2022:

      For me it’s probably my code not working, so I spend a whole day trying to work out why and it turns out to be the smallest thing. You can’t make any errors when it comes to making software for diagnosing something that may affect a patient’s life, so you have to make sure anything you find is ‘real’!

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