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Asked by anon-259758 on 30 Sep 2020. This question was also asked by anon-260560.
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Alison Young answered on 30 Sep 2020:
The hardest thing is the unknown. We look at problems that no one has solved yet and we try to do things that no one has done before so there are never “answers at the back of the book” like there are when you’re studying at school or university. It can take days, weeks, months or years to figure something out and when you start working on something you don’t know how it will go. You have to just keep trying without giving up and believe that you’ll be able to figure it out eventually with the help of other the scientists you work with.
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James Smallcombe answered on 30 Sep 2020:
For me it has been the career uncertainty. In my particular career path there are a lot of short term positions, for which you have to move around a lot. Permanent jobs are relatively senior compared to other types of employers and very few so the competition is high. The need to constantly move means its hard to put down roots, buy a house, start a family. And the lack of permanent junior jobs means you can have 5-10 years experience and be very good at your job, but still end up having to change careers and start over.
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Sonia Rodriguez answered on 1 Oct 2020:
I totally agree with Alison and James, but I would like to add dealing with frustration. This is also related to Alison’s answer. We are constantly trying out new experiments and testing new ideas, so things go wrong very often. Science is based on trial and error, and it is very important to accept failure when an experiment is not working or our hypotheses turned out to be wrong.
On the other hand, the moment you can finally connect the dots and understand all the results is very rewarding. -
Stephen Clarke answered on 6 Oct 2020:
The change of mind-set required to accept that sometimes the unexpected answer is actually the correct one. All through your education you are rewarded for getting the expected answer, but when you start working as a scientist you need to understand that the outcome of an experiment is the answer, regardless of what you expected to happen. But you then let this unexpected outcome lead you through new questions, and new experiments, and new learnings!
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Allyson Lister answered on 8 Oct 2020:
Alison (the unknown), James (job uncertainty), Sonia (frustration) and Stephen (accepting the unexpected) are all fantastic answers, and I agree with them. To this list, I will add the politics of science. When I was in school, I thought science was all about the work; everyone running experiments, doing research, and finding out how the universe worked. This is definitely true, all of this lovely science happens, but what I didn’t know was what else needed to happen to ensure science continues. In academia (this means if you are not employed by a for-profit company, and are instead working at a university or similar research institution), you need to get the money to run experiments and pay people’s salaries from somewhere.
A small amount might come directly from the university itself, but the majority of it comes from grants. Grants are chunks of money that the boss of your project needs to apply for; they write a grant proposal (that is like a *really* long essay) saying how they’d use the money, and why their project would be the best to get the money. But there are lots of projects applying for the same grant money, and that makes it really stressful for everyone, because it’s important to give out this grant money fairly. It can be really hard, and for researchers who are really good at their work and become the head of a project, they can end up spending a lot of time on grant proposals rather than the research they excel at. -
Helen Playford answered on 8 Oct 2020:
I also agree with the others, and would add that having to be patient is one of the hard things for me. Sometimes things just won’t work, sometimes things take a really long time, and sometimes you just have to park a project off to one side and come back to it later. As someone who likes Getting Things Done, that was hard for me to adjust to!
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