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Asked by 484nepk48 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 4 Nov 2017.
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Kerrianne Harrington answered on 4 Nov 2017:
It can be at times. The problem with research is… sometimes things don’t work. It’s really rewarding when it does work, but not everything goes so smoothly. With my work, because most of what I do is make things, it can be hard to know if it is not working because I don’t have the skills for it yet, or if it’s not possible. I work with very small, brittle strands of glass, and a lot of the success behind making this lies in practice. This can mean repeating the same thing lots of times!
You might work for weeks on something and find it’s no good, and that can be very disappointing. However, you get used to this and more able to deal with it. It also makes it more exciting when you do achieve something cool!
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Yo Yehudi answered on 4 Nov 2017:
Sometimes! It’s very easy to find myself with too many fun things to do and not enough time. Also, because I work on scientific software, sometimes we’ll make commitments to release things by a certain date. Deadlines always provide stress!
Another thing that can be stressful about my job is that we’re grant funded – this means governments and large funding bodies provide us with the money to do our work. To get grants, you have to think of good ideas (my team usually does all this together), write them down, polish them up until they’re perfect, and then wait (it feels like forever) to see if you were successful. If you aren’t successful, you might have to look for another job when your current grant money runs out. That’s mega stressful!
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Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:
Mine isn’t particularly – I tend to feel like you have more stress at work when you’re more important or when you’re up against deadlines, and I’m not particularly important and haven’t had many deadlines yet! It can be really frustrating when stuff doesn’t work (I spent weeks trying to make an x-ray gun give me sensible data, only to discover after repeating myself loads of times that it was broken!), but I haven’t really been as stressed here as I was when I was a teacher. Marking, planning – and actually teaching, of course – was important and always had tight deadlines, so I was stressed quite a lot!
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anon answered on 6 Nov 2017:
I think all jobs are stressful at one time or another. From my experience, jobs in science aren’t necessarily more stressful than in any other field. I think the most important thing with any career is whether the job is worth the stress, whether what you’re doing is worthwhile.
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Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:
Sometimes. Because we’re usually doing something no-one has ever done before, we can’t be sure how things will work out, it’s a bit of a risk.
You can have months, years when experiments don’t work and it can get super frustrating. Sometimes you have to work really hard because the experiments are long and you have to spend long days in the lab.
But then you can have days where it works and you finish a day knowing something that no-one else in the world knows yet, and that’s awesome!
Comments
484nepk48 commented on :
Thank you