• Question: What is the hardest thing about your job?

    Asked by anon-253904 to Ana on 11 May 2020.
    • Photo: Ana Cruz

      Ana Cruz answered on 11 May 2020:

      Hello, after this afternoons session. The hardest part for me is staying motivated to keep seeking results when a lot of things don’t work or fail on us. We learn a lot from failure but because we are at the frontline of innovation and often doing things no one else has done, they may not work. Often we go a long time with negative results (which are very important for science) and not so many positives so it gets harder to wake up to get the job done. But this is also what makes the job so interesting because we keep innovating and changing to get to the bottom of those problems.

Comments

  • Photo: Julia

    Julia commented on :

    Hi @BlessingM! For me, the hardest thing is the lack of job stability, we are normally funded for 2 or 3 years, and then we need to apply for fellowships or grants to continue our research, and that makes the motivation to drop a little bit.

  • Photo: Shaline

    Shaline commented on :

    However much I love and enjoy what I do, there are some tough days that you face, similar to any other job. I would say that I agree with the above that it’s hard to constantly be “chopping and changing” as job security can be very difficult, because research is very heavily dependent on funding. I would also argue though, that I was aware of this when signing up to do research and think it is a very valuable lesson and definitely character building to be so flexible.