• Question: What is your favourite part of your job?

    Asked by on 4 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by anon-195581, anon-195656, anon-195659, anon-195668.
    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 4 Jan 2019:

      Getting to work with many, and very varied sources of data! I can start to piece together a scientific puzzle and when I ask a specific question, I know where to look to get an answer – it really helps speed up my work, and has even led to some interesting (but accidental) discoveries that I would not have found had I not had all the data in one place!

    • Photo: Hannah Currant

      Hannah Currant answered on 4 Jan 2019:

      I get to meet and work with lots of different people who are all passionate and excited about what they do. It keeps me motivated and helps me gain inspiration so day to day research stays interesting. I also think that something I love about my job that surprised me is how creative it is! Scientific research involves a lot of problem solving and you’re often forced to think outside the box for new methods, explanations and ideas. I was torn at school whether to do something more scientific or something more creative and I really enjoy being able to use some of that creativity in my current science job.

    • Photo: Gill Harrison

      Gill Harrison answered on 4 Jan 2019:

      So many things it’s hard to focus it down to one. I suppose there are two things

      1. Solving a puzzle of why a patient is experiencing pain or has something ‘odd’ on a scan such as a widening of the little duct coming from the gallbladder. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle to try and find out what is causing the problem. Finding the answer means that the patient can get the best treatment. If we don’t know what is causing the pain, they are often sent for more tests, which delays the treatment.

      2. Seeing students who have struggled to learn the ‘art’ of scanning suddenly understand how to move the probe the way they need to. It’s almost like a light bulb moment when they just ‘get it’, which is so satisfying.

    • Photo: Kevin Daly

      Kevin Daly answered on 6 Jan 2019:

      The excitement of study something that maybe no one else in the world is studying – there are lots of other great aspects, but I find that the best!

    • Photo: Laura Nolan

      Laura Nolan answered on 7 Jan 2019:

      My favourite part of my job is developing questions about my particular area of science research, and figuring out how I might be able to answer these. This involves a lot of reading on what work has been done in my area (and usually other not so related areas), looking at other experimental data I have, thinking and going back and forth with different solutions. It’s particularly great because at this point I am just proposing what I will do and I haven’t done any experiments in the lab so nothing has gone wrong experiment-wise 🙂 I guess the next best part of my job is getting to do the experiments and seeing that my initial proposed ideas were a good idea!

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