• Question: What is the worst thing about your job and why?

    Asked by danrumford to Holly, Daz, Cat, Johnson, Pamela on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by glbrookes.
    • Photo: Holly Shelton

      Holly Shelton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I most;ly enjoy my job but if there was one thing its mostly frustrating I suppose. When you try an experiment and it does not work and you can’t work out why you can spend days going round in circles trying to decide what to do and it feels like you are getting nowhere. The best thing to do then is to talk to other scientists and see what they think. Two or three heads are better than one!

    • Photo: Pamela Lithgow

      Pamela Lithgow answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi Danrumford,
      I find it quite difficult to think about the worst thing about my job because I really love my job and I kind of get over the bad bits and only remember the good!
      But I do I agree with Holly. When you seem to be making no progress it can be really frustrating.
      Another thing that can be really rubbish is when things get in the way of me doing my work! When we have to do courses or read paperwork that are not related to my work it can be annoying because I want to get on with my work (which I love!)
      Hope that helps!
      Pam

    • Photo: Johnson Soronnadi

      Johnson Soronnadi answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Well, the worst thing maybe a big challenge to scientist and our ability to figure out and resolve it makes us love the job. I agree with Holly and Pam, because when you’re not getting the required answer is very annoying. In the lab we try to isolate bacteria from every sample coming to the lab. the final and hardest task is to identify the bacteria to determine its significance in the sample and patient treatment. its annoying when you spend days trying to identify bacteria and the doctors are waiting to get the final result. In most cases team work comes in and other scientist will be involved to think out solution to the problem.

    • Photo: Cat O'Connor

      Cat O'Connor answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi Dan,

      The worst thing…hmmmmmmm….I think maybe that feeling of you’re getting no where with a problem. Like right now, I’m still in work (it’s 20.30 on a Tuesday) because I can’t get a calculation to work. I’ve tried for hours to get it working but like Holly says, sometimes two or three heads are better than one so I’m going to try and chat to some people about my problem tomorrow. It’s probably something very silly i’ve done to make it go wrong but sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is what you need to sort our your problem!

      But I know that’ll eventually get this little problem sorted, a probably find a million more, but eventually I’ll get the work done and hopefully published. Dedication is def one of the main traits scientists should have! These sucky problems will all be forgotten when the work gets finsihed!

      Hope that helps,

      Cat

    • Photo: Darren Braddick

      Darren Braddick answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi Dan

      The worst thing day to day is negative results. They say that even bad data/results shows something, but often your subject is already so full of unknown things that you don’t learn much from a bad result because one in a million things could have been wrong – and none of which you can control!

      I hope that answers your question!

      Daz

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