• Question: How did you get to be where you are now as a scientist

    Asked by emily124 to Michael, Emma, Jen, Joseph, Mona on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by jasmine1998, meganpower.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Well I worked hard (most of the time!) at school and then chose to do Physics, Chemistry and Maths A-levels at college. I then went to university for 4 years to learn about Physics and Astrophysics and got a Masters degree at the end of that. After uni I decided I wasn’t ready to stop learning so I decided to do a PhD degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics and I’m in my 3rd year of that 🙂

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      All by the power of education. I did the school thing, followed by a stint at collage and got some A-levels which were good enough to get me into Cardiff University. There I studied biology for 4 years and in my final year my tutor said why don’t you do a PhD? I’d never thought of staying on in education before. She was great and sent me lots of potential jobs and after a few interviews I decided to go to Reading because it had an awesome project that I could really get stuck into and it sounded like lots of fun.

    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I kind of gravitated towards it. I was good at maths and chemistry at school and that taught me that there were ways to answer questions that you might be curious about. By the time I got to university you had to take three subjects in the first year. I took maths and chemistry and also biology – choosing the latter over physics which i had done at school but hated (mainly as I was rubbish). Then, because I was a runner I became more interested in physiology aspects of biology. As I moved through uni you had to focus more and more until taking only one subject in your last years – and so it happened to become physiology. In that last year I got to do my first OWN lab experiments and then I was really hooked! SO, after graduating, I took off to Londodn to study for a PhD degree for two reasons – one, simply because it gave me another chance to have a job in which you dd experiments (seeing as I’d got hooked) and, two, the project was to work on blood vessels which my undergrad lab experiments had been on. After that, I just tried to find research jobs that were in a similar line and, athough it’s not easy to do that and I had to move around wuite a bit, I’ve been lucky enough to keep at it. If I hadn’t been lucky and had to look for a different type of job I’m sure I would still have tried for something sciene-related – I did, for example, once turn down the offer of a job of a science writer for a European drug company. So, you don’t need to work in a lab to use science in your career.

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