• Question: When did you decide you wanted to go into microbiology?

    Asked by to Peter, Hannah, Ramya, Keith, Bethany on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , , , , , .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I always wanted to be a scientist. I loved practical work, solving problems and finding out why things were the way they were. I was also good at science at school.
      I decided to become a microbiologist because I found at A-level biology I was more interested in things at the small scale – I liked biochemistry better than ecology for example.
      Another thing that pointed me towards microbiology was an article in the New Scientist magazine about biofilms and how microbes can live together and form mini-communities. I highly recommend having a browse through New Scientist magazine as it covers all kinds of science in a way that most people can understand. See what type of science grabs you! If your school library doesn’t have it – ask them why not.

    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      My sister gave me a microscope when i was about 10 and i was absolutely fascinated by the micro world that we cant see. I used look at everything i could get on my little microscope. I loved looking at microbes in little water droplets moving about. I think that is where my fascination towards microbiology came from.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      This is a great question – and honestly, I never really made a conscious decision that I wanted to do what I do now. My favourite subject at school was maths, so that’s what I chose to do at university. In my second year, I decided to specialise in statistics, which looks at the likelihood of things happening, and how we can test hypotheses using data, as it’s something used across all the sciences to see if a result is significant. I could have equally studied meteorology (weather), vehicle design, aerodynamics, or code breaking though! One of the statistics courses was on the use of statistics in genetics and forensics, and that’s when everything started to fall into place. The forensics part was fascinating (we got to look at comparing bullet, glass, and fibre evidence), but I loved the genetics aspect, as genetics had been one of my favourite parts of biology at school. Most importantly, I began to see how useful statistics could be with understanding the vast amounts of genetic data now being collated – not only from humans, but also for use with microbes to help improve public health. The rest, as they say, is history…

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      For me it was not a concious decision, I did not sit down for a long time thinking ‘When I grow up I want to be a microbiologist.’ At school I was introduced to microscopes long before I learnt about the word microbiology, at least in a practical sense.
      At university we then had modules on microbiology and I always looked forward to the practicals as they often meant taking swabs of your mouth and seeing what kind of nasty looking things would grown on a petri dish and then also getting microscopic worms out of infected mice and seeing how they behaved to different environments.
      But it was only during my PhD that I really got heavily involved in microbiology and it was only because my project at the time had two bosses. One who was a protein chemist and the other the microbiologist. As I have previously said else where I am always very keen to learn new techniques and I could not resit the opportunity to learn more about the techniques involved in the field. I would still say I am more of a protein chemist but the skills I have learnt in microbiology I enjoyed and certainly helped me to achieve my PhD and also in some aspects of the jobs I undertake now.

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