• Question: This career involves a lot of trial and error. Do you get discouraged easily?

    Asked by anon-196023 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      After doing lots of research you have to learn to take bad results on the chin. The thing with research, is that what you are doing has never been done before so you don’t actually know if it is going to work or not. This means lots of things don’t work. It can be easy to forget that it is just the nature of doing new research, and not the fact that you are rubbish at doing an experiment. A way to balance it is to make sure you turn off on an evening and at weekends. Having a good balance between work and your personal life can help you forget about the bad results.

      Also, when you get a good result it is a great feeling, so you do focus on that a lot more!

    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Yes. Very. When I’ve had ten experiments in a row not work, it can be hard to motivate yourself to get up in the morning and haul yourself into the lab but getting to chat to you guys this week has been reminding me of how privileged I am to be doing the work that I am doing.

      It’s also very easy to compare yourself to other researchers: how many experiments they’ve done, how many papers they’ve written etc. but everyone’s research is different and you don’t know how many rubbish experiments they themselves have had to put up with.

Comments