• Question: what is your favourite part of your job

    Asked by bad man matt to Chris, Rebecca, Josh, Rob, Susan on 18 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by pippa, Pendall and Izzy, ezza,soph, louis, Naomi845, tibby!, ella, sklover02, Olivia.
    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      My favourite part of my job is when everything comes together and slots into place – if my data looks nice and I find a nice big difference that is like the one I was hoping to find or that I predicted I would find – that will make a nice picture for me to put in a publication or show to some people at a conference. That almost never happens.

      Travelling to conferences is very fun because I get to travel around the world to new exotic places that I would never be able to go to on my own. This doesn’t happen very often.

      So I would settle for meeting all the amazing people who want to help me with my research by letting me take images of their brains. I love taking their images with an MRI scanner and then showing them a picture of their brain and they always say “wow, I didn’t know it looked like that”. Great fun!

    • Photo: Chris Armstrong

      Chris Armstrong answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Oh man, I absolutely love figuring something out. If theres something weird in the data that doesn’t make sense and I can think of a reason behind it, or whats happened differently in the system to cause it, I just love it.

      Then there’s the completion of a task, I think that will always be satisfying. Just scrubbing something off your to-do list, big or small thats a great feeling.

      Oh ohh and theres this “click” that happens when the lasers fire, its kind of quiet and you have to know its there when you hear it but its up their in my favourite things.

      Oh and of course that first morning coffee.

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I like lots of bits of my job!

      I like it when something that you’ve been working on for ages finally clicks: the program runs, the data make sense, the apparatus starts working properly, whatever.

      I like going to new and interesting places: in my career I’ve spent 5 years in Germany, 2 years in California, 1 year in Boston, Massachusetts, and 1 year in CERN, and worked on experiments in those places and in Japan and the south of France. I’ve also been to conferences in Beijing, Madrid and Sydney, among other places.

      I like it when a student I’ve been trying to explain something to finally “gets it”. That sudden look of understanding is what makes teaching worthwhile. It can happen with any age of student, from the primary school kids I give talks to to my PhD students.

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