• Question: Do you like science, love it or is it your life?

    Asked by anon-292576 on 26 Apr 2021.
    • Photo: Rosie Goodburn

      Rosie Goodburn answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      For me, it’s my job, that I enjoy and find fulfilling. However, it’s also a lens through which I like to view the world: when I look out of the window, I might look at a tree and remember how I’ve learnt that most of a tree’s mass is made up of carbon and that this carbon comes from carbon dioxide in the air. Or I might look at the sky and think about how it is blue because the shorter blue wavelengths of light are scattered more by air molecules than longer ones.
      .
      On the other hand, I don’t view everything through a scientific lens: music, movies, and games, there is no need to analyse things too deeply to enjoy them, but it can be fun to think scientifically sometimes 🙂

    • Photo: Kip Heath

      Kip Heath answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      I love science, and while I have a terrible work life balance I think it is important to keep some of your personal life separate.

      They say that very few people lie on their death bed and wished they had worked more. I like to make sure that I say yes to random opportunities and keep my life varied. I feel I have succeeded in that!

    • Photo: Ed Peake

      Ed Peake answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      1. Do I like/love science – yes its pretty cool.
      1.a. Science helped eradicate terrible diseases like smallpox caused by variola virus (VARV) and rinderpest caused by the rinderpest virus (RPV).
      1.b. Science explains things like gravity, light, radiation, electricity, heat, magnetism, which is pretty good if you want things like internet, GPS, microwaves, wifi, etc. 🙂

      2. Is it my life?
      I think its my job, not my life. There are 168 hours in a week, I spend more of my week asleep (56 hours) than I do at work ( about 40 hours).

    • Photo: Michael Capeness

      Michael Capeness answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      I do love science, and consider I’m quite lucky that I get to do it as my job. Because it is not necessarily a 9-5 job, (it’s very hard to get bacteria to stick to normal work hours), it can sometimes throw a little imbalance in terms of how much time between work and life overlap, and sometimes I do have to force myself to go home and to put down the pipette rather than to do just one more experiment.

    • Photo: Rebecca Reed

      Rebecca Reed answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      I definitely like science. Sometimes I love it when things work well or I find something cool, or I do an experiment I enjoy, but it’s definitely a job at the end of the day. I enjoy doing it, and I don’t think I’d enjoy another job as much because there’s so much variety in science, but I’m really strict about my work/life balance so I make sure I have time outside of work too. I think it’s important to have that mentality in science because there can be pressure to make science your life, but we’re whole people not machines! Making sure to have time for yourself outside of science is something I always stress to any students I supervise.

    • Photo: Lucile Crete

      Lucile Crete answered on 26 Apr 2021:

      I love science, and enjoy very much my job, but I wouldn’t say it’s my life. I am very happy to work as a scientist, as work in an important part of life, and this kind of job offers quite a lot of variety and opportunities, which keeps things interesting.

      However, but there are also a lot of other things that I love that are not related to science (music, films, reading, writing, baking…), and it is important for me to make time for these things, otherwise I don’t think I would enjoy my work as much!

    • Photo: Ross Low

      Ross Low answered on 27 Apr 2021:

      I love science. I like reading and watching science fiction. I like learning about advances in other fields and I also like doing science in my job.

      The reason I would say it’s my life though is that there is one major scientific idea that I try to apply all the time: changing my ideas when presented with new data. If I’m wrong about something I’d rather know about it 🙂

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