• Question: Do you ever get bored of the section of science you work in?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I never get bored with learning about micro-organisms because they do so many clever things.

      I have the odd day when I find work boring but that happens in every job. Some days you just have to get on with the paperwork.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      No, its very exciting to be working on viruses that jump from bats to people.
      There are certainly specific jobs that have to be done that are quite boring for example I regularly need to gather outputs (results of tests) from lots of different computer programs and compare them. I write quite a bit of computer code to make this easier/faster but even with this it is a boring job that I just need to get done so I can on with more interesting work.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      There will always be days at work that are less exciting than others but without them you wouldn’t be so grateful for the times when the science is really interesting.

      One of the great things about modern science is that you can always look at something in a different light so if I start to feel despondent about my work I’ll look for different ways to tackle my problem.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      There are always some aspects of science that are less interesting or exciting as others, but are necessary to allow you to do the fun stuff. Some of the computer programs I use with sequence data can take hours, days or even weeks to run…so the lull between the excitement of receiving the sequences and setting off an analysis to then finding out the results can often be quite tedious. It does allow me to do some different things though, as I’ll usually have several projects on the go at once, so I won’t be bored for too long. Plus, the waiting makes the excitement all the better when it comes!

    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      Like everyone here, i dont get bored of what i do. What is important i think is that we all do so much translational work. So to do something we have to learn about the physics of how machines work and the chemistry of what the DNA molecules do. So there is always something new and exciting to learn

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