Question: what is your favourite part of being a scientist

Liza Selley answered on 18 Jun 2018:

Hi Jade05

There’s lots of things I like about being a scientist – friendly colleagues, the freedom to study a topic that interests me, the chance to discover something new being just a few. I think the best thing for me though is the variety. People picture scientists in laboratories wearing white coats and making explosions but we actually do a lot of different things in our days.

Of course experiments play a big part but there are so many different techniques that we use in the lab. For example, on Monday I could be extracted DNA from lung tissue before running a chemistry based experiment on Tuesday and doing some work with bacteria on Wednesday.

We also spend a lot of time on the computer analysing data, writing up our work for publication and reading other people’s results to get fresh ideas for our own work. Every now and then we go to conferences which are big meetings for like-minded scientists who get together to share their research. This is really fun as you learn loads, meet interesting people and find out what the experts think about your research. The last one I went to even had a disco! We did take our white coats off for that!