• Question: Would you recommend your job to others?

    Asked by anon-188237 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      Thank you for the question. I would encourage anyone to get involved or engage with science. That said, as much as I like my job, my particular line of work can be quite exhausting. Staying in a sleep lab all night can really take it out of you and you have to be quite committed! I find the rewards for these efforts are worth the trade-offs but I can fully appreciate that it might not be for everyone.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      Absolutely!
      I can honestly say maybe five ten years ago I’d never have imagined I could do this job. But I am! I would say that as long as you have a bit of passion driving you, you can overcome the other obstacles. You just gotta be interested in what you’re doing because that interest becomes greater than the workload and the all nighters and deadlines. The passion can make you unstoppable.

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I would also say that working in / around science is amazing, as you are working towards improving lives of people – and from there you can always go to more applied areas, like informing policy on education, changing medical treatments etc.
      At the same time, failure is one big part of everyday life of scientists – our papers get rejected by prestiguous journals, we don’t get chosen for jobs we apply for, other people get awards but not us, our experiment show that answer to our questions (“is there an effect of X on Y”) is often “NO” or (“it depends”). One needs to learn to deal with rejection, and this is hard and never comes easily, not even to senior profs.

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