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Asked by anon-200227 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 7 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-200145.
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Oliver Gordon answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Love this question. Positives? Getting to do something cool, that makes people want to talk to you, and getting to feel the satisfaction of doing something really hard.
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We don’t normally focus on the negatives though, even though there really can be quite a few! I think the biggest issue is our own mental health. Scientists have a very poor culture in that we think we need to be “seen” to be working all the time, and how it’s cool to not take care of our bodies. It’s not uncommon to find out that my boss was up until past midnight sending me an email about something. Personally, I made myself very ill when I was preparing for exams during my degree and ended up fainting at one point!
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Do you have to do that to succeed? No, of course not! Do people expect you to? No! But you still do it. Yes, sure, it’s out of passion, but it’s not at all smart. I’m very happy that mental health is being taken MUCH more seriously now in my department.
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I think it’s also frustrating how SLOW things can be! I’ve had a project finished 3 months ago, but we are still having a back and forth discussion about how we write sentences in the report, rather than going back to doing more science!
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David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 10 Mar 2019:
To me, the biggest positive is that it feels so fulfilling, like you’re really making a difference (obviously this will also really depend on your personal preferences). As Oliver also already mentioned, a big part for me is also finally getting a breakthrough, the satisfaction of solving a problem.
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The negatives are definitely going through long, tricky times with what feels like very little or no progress whatsoever. A lot of people also struggle with “switching off” – even on a day off or evening, you always feel like you have to do more, run another experiment, or read another research paper.
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