• Question: What's it like to be a scientist??

    Asked by anon-356733 on 13 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Zoltan Lipp

      Zoltan Lipp answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      Being a scientist is cool, you can investigate problems no-one ever had before, you can work with smart people, learn a lot and its an awesome feeling to discover something new!
      On the other hand sometimes it can be lonely (if you are working on a unique or rare field) and frustrating (you fail a lot before success) as well.

    • Photo: Adam Steinberg

      Adam Steinberg answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      When you’re a scientist, you make problems.
      Sometimes they’re easy problems, like figuring out where a thrown ball will land.
      Sometimes they’re hard problems, like describing the interactions of atoms.
      But the trickiest problems are the ones that sound easy, but are surprisingly tough: an famous example of this is explaining why the sky is blue, which is far from obvious!

      A big part of the job of a scientist is to turn hard problems into easy ones, or figure out the sneaky thing that makes it tricky – and then, if you’re lucky, and with the help of everyone around you, the next step is to start figuring out a solution.

    • Photo: Vicky Fawcett

      Vicky Fawcett answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      I think it’s great! I love my job (which is always a good thing ;)) and find it exciting working out the mysteries of the universe. I think a big positive of being a scientist (or at least an astronomer) is that we get to travel the world, to meet collaborators, go to conferences and (for me) visit telescopes.
      I also love working with people from all over the world, learning about different cultures and food.

    • Photo: Lucien Heurtier

      Lucien Heurtier answered on 13 Mar 2023:

      Being a scientist is a lot of fun! I always get to invent something! I also like that we build pretty stuff, can program cool thing on a computer, it’s definitely a very creative job.

      I love that I have to create new theories. I spend my days dreaming about what could be a smart theory to explain the Universe’s history, to explain what is dark matter, to try to discover it with experiments. It’s a lot of imagination and creativity. And a lot of pretty pictures too! Have you seen the last pictures from the James Web space telescope??

    • Photo: Joshua Bibby

      Joshua Bibby answered on 14 Mar 2023:

      Being a scientist is different for everyone, most scientists work on very small areas of science but study that area very closely. So everybody’s day will look a lot different, some spend all day in the lab, some in front of a computer, some go to remote islands to build space telescopes!

      The one thing we all do is solve problems, sometimes we come up with the problems ourselves, sometimes they happen on accident, but we are always trying to solve problems and then explaining how we did to someone else. That someone can be another scientist, a engineer, or a member of the public.

    • Photo: Stuart Clare

      Stuart Clare answered on 17 Mar 2023:

      Good bits – asking interesting questions and discovering things that no-one else has discovered before. Also working in a great team.

      Bad bits – science can be very slow and often frustrating. You can try and try and try at a problem until you get something to work. Sometimes experiments don’t work as well as you hope.

      All in all it is a great job, but it helps if you are passionate about what you are working on.

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