• Question: How long do you work each day, and on what days do you work? Also, do you only get paid for your discoveries? Or do you get money every day regardless?

    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 work about 7.5 hours a day, Monday to Friday and I get paid for working those hours. However I do sometimes work slightly longer hours if I have really important and urgent work or sometimes I just get interested in my work and forget what time it is!
      As a Clinical Scientist working in a Public Health England (PHE) clinical laboratory I might have to work late nights or weekends if there was an outbreak of a disease and we suddenly had to do a lot more work but this doesn’t happen very often.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      A typical day will be from 9-5 but sometimes if the work you doing requires you can go on into the evening. The longest I ever spent in a lab was 24 hours straight and sadly it was not a one off as I needed to repeat the experiment multiple occasions to ensure the result I was seeing was real. I used to do weekends along with weekdays but recently I’ve been getting the weekends off again.
      It would be great if you got a bonus if you made an important discovery. There are the Nobel prizes but they can take decades to receive and are reserved for only the very best scientific breakthroughs. The money from that also has to go back into science rather than your own pocket.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      That’s hard to say – it really depends on what I’m working on! Generally I try to stick to working 9:30am-6pm, Monday to Friday, although I’ll often work a bit later or over the weekend if I get carried away on a project!

      As for your second question…I get paid a regular wage from the university, so get paid for the days I work and not only for my discoveries. This is a good thing, as 1) it might be very hard to quantify as a ‘discovery’, 2) some discoveries take years to complete and 3) research is unpredictable and doesn’t always lead to big discoveries – quite often it takes us down dead ends, and that can tell us useful things too.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I’m a PhD student so i get paid a scholarship by the university each month. As part of the conditions for this I am expected to teach undergraduate students in the lab which can be a lot of fun but adds a lot of hours onto my day.
      I need to complete my PhD in certain time period so its important that I get as much as I can done each day I think on average I work around 9 hours a day. I try to keep weekends free but do spend quite a few weekends working. On days when I’m teaching I have to usually put in an extra couple of hours to make up for the time I spend away from my own research.

      As Bethany said it can be hard to decide what makes a discovery important and sometimes it takes years before people realise that some piece of research is actually hugely important. An example would be George Boole who developed a type of mathematics called Boolean algerbra, he died in the 19th century but Boolean algerbra is the basis for all modern computer programming. So when he developed it no-one knew that some day the modern world would depend on it.

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