• Question: How did you get into this line of work?

    Asked by anon-196670 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 12 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      After my PhD, I applied for something called a fellowship. A fellowship is a set of amount of money that is given to you to do work that you have proposed. After sending off the application, I had an interview and was awarded the fellowship, which meant I could move to the University of Manchester to work as a research scientist. That is where I work now, doing the same job but working on a different set of experiments as I have now finished what I worked on in the fellowship proposal.
      Ultimately though, I set on this career when I started my PhD, as this was in the same area of science, but obviously a PhD is a degree, so you are still a student – it’s technically not a job.

    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      At the end of high school, a family friend died from cancer. I had decided to study chemistry at school because I had been advised it gave me a lot of options afterward – Margaret Thatcher, our old Prime Minister, and Angela Merkel, current chancellor of Germany, both have chemistry degrees! The incident with the family friend drew me to wanting to study drug molecules.

      After my first degree I was looking for a cancer PhD and after several interviews, I managed to get this one after finding it on a website called findaphd.com

    • Photo: Jennifer Harris

      Jennifer Harris answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      I got into this line of work by spending many hours on voluntary work, namely outreach, public engagement and attending policy events. I also attended many career events to identify what area of work I wanted to go into and worked on policy research in my spare time. I was also awarded funding to do a 6month secondment with Government which helped me greatly in my interview for my current job.

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