what’s the hardest bit about your job?

Lauren Burns answered on 1 Jun 2018:

For me, the hardest part of doing a PhD is finding the motivation to get out of bed in the morning! As I don’t have a teacher or lecturer or even a boss that is always by my side, making sure I am doing what I need to do, I have to be really motivated to make sure I still achieve. There is always the temptation to sit at home, eat ice cream and watch Netflix, rather than go into Uni. However, every day I fight that temptation, and then have a great feeling of success and pride – and enjoy my chill/down time even more because of it!

Liza Selley answered on 1 Jun 2018:

One of the exciting things about research is that you make discoveries that nobody has made before. At the same time this can be really challenging because you are effectively the expert in that area – nobody else has the answer if you get stuck with how to do an experiment or what the results mean. This means that sometimes it can take weeks or even months of tweaking your methods before an idea works as it should. I think all scientists would agree though, all the head scratching and wailing at the walls is worth it when your experiment finally works and you get to learn something new and exciting.

Joanne Sharpe answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Sadly, science rarely ever works first time, and often it feels like your experiments are doomed to fail forever! It can be difficult to keep going when you are struggling to get your experiments working the way you think they should, but this is all part of the fun really – the feeling of satisfaction when you finally manage to work out was going wrong is amazing.

Claire Donald answered on 1 Jun 2018:

The hardest thing about my job is that some experiments don’t always work the way they should! Sometimes you can do everything the way it should be done but your experiment will still fail and you have no idea why. Unfortunately that’s just part of what being a scientist involves. Its particularly frustrating when you have repeated the experiment several times and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Or when you are in a hurry to get the data for a talk or to publish your findings. But the good days when everything does work the way it is supposed to more than makes up for the bad days!

David Grainger answered on 1 Jun 2018:

I agree with all the answers here – finding motivation when experiments don’t work can be tough.

But for me, the biggest issue comes before this. I struggle to focus on one topic and stick with it. The more I learn about a particular topic, the more questions pop into my head. This is alright when at school because many of the questions I asked, my teachers could answer. But now, as I read scientific papers and listen to presentations, many of the questions are yet to be answered because it is the edge of human knowledge.

This is a double-edged sword. It means there are loads I can work on and I love answering the questions by doing my research but I often find it tough to firstly pick my question and then stick with it.

Alexandra Hogan answered on 1 Jun 2018:

The hardest part for me is that I always feel like I have so much more to learn! I think it’s a difficult part of being a scientist, but also one of the best parts, because the job is never boring and I enjoy learning new things. I’m trying to learn more about biology and immunology at the moment, to help with my research on modelling vaccines, and it’s really tough but very interesting at the same time!

Joey Shepherd answered on 1 Jun 2018:

I also agree with many of the answers here. For me one of the hardest parts is not having enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do or need to do – you can sometimes have so many ideas and thoughts and plans for things you want to try and investigate but there just isn’t enough time (or unfortunately, money) for them all so some ideas can get left behind. But then you sometimes rediscover your old notes and start working on things again!

Donna MacCallum answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Now that I am not in the lab all of the time, it’s finding the time to get out of my office and into the lab to do some experiments. Now I have to ask my technician and students to do the things that I want to do… that’s hard!

Ashley Akbari answered on 1 Jun 2018:

So many great projects and pieces of research that can be done – just trying to find the time to do them! But along with this comes such great variety and opportunities to work with some many different people and learn loads of new skills and techniques.

Damian Mole answered on 2 Jun 2018:

Most of the time, people doing science measure their success by a process called peer review, where other scientists read your work and make judgements about whether its is important, exciting, value for money or done properly. That process isn’t always easy to work with, and sometimes it gets to you when peer review is undeservedly a bit negative. However, it may be the best system we have, out of a range of worse alternatives! The same thing is often said about democracy as a political system…

The most important thing is to try and filter out the helpful bits of peer review from the less helpful comments, and not get too bogged down by it. There are lots of stories of Nobel prize winners whose science was rejected by peer review when they first tried to tell the world about their amazing discoveries!

Jason Chu answered on 2 Jun 2018:

The fact that there’s not enough hours to do everything I want. Whether that’s an experiment in the lab, analysing my results or going out to the community to talk about science.

Alex Haragan answered on 2 Jun 2018:

I’d agree with Jason on this – there just aren’t enough hours in the day!

I love what I do – but research means experiments, lots of reading, writing, meetings, talks, presentations, asking for money (for more research), collaborations with other scientists and much more!

Everyone is different – but I imagine we all do lots of other work on the side just because we find it interesting.

Its fascinating and wonderful! But at busy periods it means I work very long days and sometimes feel like I don’t get to see my family or friends. Worse still I sometimes go entire weeks, even months without getting outside to go climbing or biking – nightmare!

Hannah Farley answered on 3 Jun 2018:

When you’ve been working on an experiment for a while and it just doesn’t work – sometimes you never find out why, you just do it again and it works. Sometimes you get stuck at part of an experiment for months and you can’t get past it – there aren’t really teachers to ask for help, you can ask other people in your lab but because we all work on slightly different things they might not be able to help much. It’s hard to motivate yourself to keep going when this happens, it’s easy to find other things to do and put off the difficult things which isn’t good for your project.

Laura Hemming answered on 4 Jun 2018:

For me, I think the hardest thing is that you sometimes have to have a bit of a thick skin in science. Although you might think that you’ve made an awesome discovery and you want to tell other people about it, not everyone is always interested in it. Although it can be tough, I think that there is a bit of a movement now to try and make academia a bit more accepting, and to make people more aware of looking after their own wellbeing. I’m certainly pushing for this, and my hope is that in a few years this will be the norm!

Claudia Bonfio answered on 4 Jun 2018:

I think the hardest part is when you have so many things to do… that you actually forget WHY you are doing that. Being a scientist can be slightly stressful (sometimes experiments don’t simply work, sometimes you have long flights and long long layovers…) and sometimes I feel as if I don’t know anymore why I am doing what I am doing. Luckily, I have a solution for it… For me, a relaxing walk and an ice cream work perfectly to boost me up and cleaning my mind from bad thoughts, so that the day after I am ready again to do what I love =)

Helen Cooper answered on 5 Jun 2018:

The hardest part of my job is knowing that animals will need to be used for studies for many years to come, because the alternatives aren’t good enough to replace them yet (although there are advancements all the time it’s hard to simulate how a whole body system works because it is very complex and we don’t understand everything yet).

When I no longer have a job it’ll be an amazing day for laboratory animals! I’d need a new job though!

Question: what's the hardest bit about your job?

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