• Question: If your favourite subject was English, how come you are a scientist?

    Asked by anon-200687 to Oliver on 6 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Oliver Gordon

      Oliver Gordon answered on 6 Mar 2019: last edited 6 Mar 2019 7:02 pm

      I think you can like lots of things. Not only do your tastes change as you grow up, but what they actually involve changes.
      .
      I ended up really disliking English, funnily enough. When I got to GCSE it became a game of “write some ridiculous sentences to pretend you know why this specific author put a full stop instead of a comma,” and it just wound me up as to how… unscientific it was! Now, what’s scientific? Oh yes, science!
      .
      In school, science was sort of just “hey, here’s some facts. We already know them, so whatever.” I really didn’t connect with it. When I got older, I realised that that just isn’t the case (it’s partly why I love doing things like ImAScientist!) There’s so much we don’t know, and it’s so satisfying to do something really hard (and interesting!), and seeing it work. I felt like that “feeling of making progress” type thing happened in English when I was younger, but not in science. Now I know it happens in science, and it just clicked with me.
      .
      There’s no shame in changing what you like – that’s part of the human experience! (EDIT: Looking at your profile I don’t quite think your tastes will change from biology to physics, though! 😉)

Comments

  • Photo: anon-200687

    anon-200687 commented on :

    At the moment I really love English lessons and I’m actually trying to wright my own gothic style book about a guy called Edward. I think that what you said about explaining why the author used a full stop rather than a comma totally makes sense.
    The part I like most about it is that words really make sense to me rather than numbers. This is why I prefer English to science. But I really think that science is cool and that you can find out so many things about life that we never knew before.
    The thing I also like about English is that you can combine so many different elements and subjects into one. Like I’m reading a book at the moment about technology and I dressed up for world book day as dr.Jekyll and mr.Hyde, which is sci-fi.
    I really think its cool that you realised what you actually wanted in life and that you are fulfilling that dream. I also want to be a kinda sorta scientist myself as I think that a speech language pathologist looks at speech and helps people with stutters or people who simply do not know how to use their voice boxes.I might need to learn more about it before I finalise my dream though. 🙂