• Question: What is the worst part of your job and what is the best part of your job?

    Asked by liamw to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by georgia123, emilybrockwell, byronplumridge, rebeccaayres00001, hannahbrown1, princesselliecertifiedlightskin, sweetypie130, becci, chrissanger, elliemariepearson, kanedale, majid96, antonia123, codytyler002, meganpower, fgibson, madmollypop, lolscientist, smitj017, zagad001, hayej003.
    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      The best part is setting up an experiment to test a theory that you have, watching the experiment happen (or waiting for it to happen if it takes a few days or weeks) and then, if you’re in luck, having the thrill of eventually seeing it work. Nowadays I usually direct others to do the experiments so I get an extra wee thrill seeing them enjoy the new discovery.

      The worst part is being continually hassled to fill in forms to justify your existence by a bunch of beancounters that have never taught students or done a scientific experiment in their life. These people are called university administrators. I can’t imagine where they get their job satisfaction from.

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The freedom to investigate things hat interest me has to be the best part of the job. It means that I can have several projects on the go at the same time which keeps me busy and involved in lots of different areas of science such as genetics, biochemistry and physiology. Plus getting to travel abroad for conferences and lab meetings which involve coffee and cake are definite bonuses.

      On the flip side doing a PhD doesn’t always seem like such great fun, you often end up working very long hours which can be quite tiring (I spent 13 hours at work on Monday sampling a field trial) and because everything needs to be repeated you often end up doing the same thing over and over again. Yet despite this the positives far outweigh the negatives.

    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I think the best part of my job is getting to use massive telescopes! It’s just super cool 😀 Although as Emma said, getting to travel all over the world to meet other astronomers at conferences is also pretty awesome.

      The worst part for me is probably having to do quite a bit of computer programming because I’m not that good at it. However I love the moment when I finally get my computer programs to work so it’s not all bad, just sometimes takes weeks of fixing silly mistakes to get it to work!

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