• Question: Have you all achieved what you wanted as scientists, or are you still working to achieve your goals?

    Asked by anon-188308 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 15 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-188302.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Hi 964memp34 (and Gracie!) thank you for the question. I can’t speak for the others but I am still very early in my career, I only got qualified to call myself ‘Dr Reid’ a few years ago. Because I am so junior I really have a long way to go in ‘making my mark’ on the world, so to speak. As such I am a long way off doing a number of things. I would like to do more research, but in the last year or so I have been thinking about starting to ‘pivot’ more into science communication. I love doing it so much I may end up ultimately searching for a job that lets me do it full time. This might include writing a book about popular science (most likely psychology). This is one of the reasons I am happy to be involved in this event.

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Hi 🙂

      To me, 2018 was transformative as I got a career development grant, which in simple terms means that I can pay my own salary for a few years, and this, beside being an obvious distinction (about which I don’t care much), allows me to continue and extend researching what I am excited about right now. In my current work, I currently integrate many of the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience and brain imaging as well as technology, and I feel extremely lucky to have worked with people who introduced me to this type of research. I consider myself lucky – but at the same time only at the beginning of a very exciting road – from studying things with all those tools, I am now aiming to change such areas as education and rehabiliation of different brain disorders in children. So I’ve achieved a lot already from point of view of my aims, but also I have long – term goals. 🙂

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 16 Nov 2018:

      Hey guys! This a pretty great question and I’ll try to answer it as best as I can.
      Being a PhD student still I am only at the tip of the beginning of my career as a scientist I think for now I’m still in pursuit of my major goals eg. completing my PhD, qualifying to become a clinical neuropsychologist, working in a practice with patients, become a science writer, eventually being some kind of clinical and research lead and all the other possibilities there are!).
      That being said, I think I accomplished the goals to get me to this stage? Like get my bachelors, getting good work experience, getting my masters, and then finally getting on to the PhD programme and getting funding for it. As a scientist with the next goal on my list being finishing this PhD, I have to take this big goal and break it down into smaller more manageable goals otherwise it gets so big and looming! These days my little goals are things like getting ethical approval to conduct a bunch of interviews in memory clinics or writing some good science articles on the bits of research that I’ve done!

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