Day-to-day it’s the stuff that’s nothing to do with science or teaching – stuff we do to keep the Uni running. Important, but dull. Paperwork things.
More generally about the science, the worst thing in science to me is that people sometimes won’t share all their results (their “data”). People will share some, or won’t share at all. So you can be working on something, and know someone else is working on that same thing, but that person won’t share data. That’s pretty depressing sometimes because it feels like that slows down science.
But let’s focus on the good things. There are more of those.
The worst thing for me was early on in my project when I had to do a really basic experiment to get things started. But this basic experiment wouldn’t work for me. I did it about 8 times and tried all kinds of different things, but I still couldn’t make it work, and I couldn’t move on to the next experiments either until this one was done.
Eventually, about 3 months in, with a bit of help, and buying all new chemicals, we got it to work.
So I guess that there is a lot of repetition in science before something exciting happens. This can be pretty frustrating and it can feel as though you are just wasting time.
Day-to-day it’s the stuff that’s nothing to do with science or teaching – stuff we do to keep the Uni running. Important, but dull. Paperwork things.
More generally about the science, the worst thing in science to me is that people sometimes won’t share all their results (their “data”). People will share some, or won’t share at all. So you can be working on something, and know someone else is working on that same thing, but that person won’t share data. That’s pretty depressing sometimes because it feels like that slows down science.
But let’s focus on the good things. There are more of those.
0
The worst thing for me was early on in my project when I had to do a really basic experiment to get things started. But this basic experiment wouldn’t work for me. I did it about 8 times and tried all kinds of different things, but I still couldn’t make it work, and I couldn’t move on to the next experiments either until this one was done.
Eventually, about 3 months in, with a bit of help, and buying all new chemicals, we got it to work.
So I guess that there is a lot of repetition in science before something exciting happens. This can be pretty frustrating and it can feel as though you are just wasting time.
0