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Asked by anon-259758 on 30 Sep 2020.
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Will Davison answered on 30 Sep 2020:
For me, I’d say its how many different jobs you’re expected to do. You can’t just do science, you also have to build your experimental setups (which involves lots of plumbing, and wiring for me), do all your experiments, do complicated maths and statistics on the data you get, write up your experiments, produce pretty graphs and diagrams for your data, teach people your science,, get important people to care about your science and pay you to carry on doing it, teach people other peoples science, and so on and so on!
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Richard Fielder answered on 30 Sep 2020:
The worst thing about being a scientist is probably the same as for most jobs – you have to spend a lot of time not actually doing the interesting parts and instead having to handle paperwork. If you’re doing experiments, you have to make sure to write down exactly what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Software needs to be properly documented so other people can use it. Scientific papers need be carefully written and edited. Making sure everything is done properly and recorded properly so that peope can trust your results is very important, but it’s not the part most scientists actually enjoy doing.
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Tim Knapp answered on 30 Sep 2020:
As a Biomedical scientist some times the job entails working ‘on call’ which means you can get called to go into work any time during the night. 🙁
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James Smallcombe answered on 30 Sep 2020:
I would say the amount of administration and applying for funding.
It’s important to justify why projects deserve money, but it’s not the same skill-set as doing the actual research and scientists aren’t the best people to do it. -
Sonia Rodriguez answered on 10 Oct 2020:
The worst of being a scientist is the absence of job stability. It is something positive in a way, because we are constantly selecting the best prepared scientists but it is also quite stressful having to apply for new funding and contracts every one-two years.
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