• Question: why did you become a scientist

    Asked by to Sam, Sarah, Roberto, Nate, Nat on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Many reasons, I guess. The first is simply that I love to ask questions and find out about the world around me. I think it’s great, when you think you know something, like how something works, and find out that it’s nothing like you thought. It makes the world such a richer place.

      And then you have all the other benefits. I get to travel around the world, I don’t have a boss, I get to do what I love, and I get to meet people from all over the planet. Oh, and I hate to get up early, and being a scientist is one of the few jobs that I know where I can get up anytime I want. 🙂

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I think because I’m nosy! I love finding out new things and learning about things. I love that every day I will learn something new.

      I also get to travel a lot and see new places and countries and meet new people which I love

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I love knowing how things work and how everything fits together. And I like working out how things work for myself even more! Because of that, I’ve always found science interesting, though I didn’t know which parts of science interested me most straight away – you have to know a bit about things before you can decide if they interest you or not.

      But to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d like the actual job of being a scientist until I tried it. During my undergraduate university course, I was lucky to have the chance to do research for a year. I loved it, which made it easy to decide to do a PhD and carry on!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I wanted to become a scientist because I like asking questions about how things work as well as finding an answer to those questions! I have always been really interested in rocks so when I discovered I could work towards getting a job that allowed me to play with them all the time, I knew it was what I wanted to do!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I wanted to understand in detail how the Universe works, and what it is made of. At University, I was taught only so much, and I quickly realized that there was much more out there that one could learn about. So I decided I wanted to try.

      I also like the fact that as a scientist you get to choose your own line of work — you can study anything you are interested in about the Universe, and nobody will tell you to stop! It’s wonderful to have this freedom to investigate anything that strikes your curiosity.

      You also get to meet very interesting people, to travel all around the world to conferences and to collaborate with other scientists. Plus, I am fortunate that I get to talk a lot with students like yourselves, which is great because it’s always fun to discuss science with people who are interested in it.

      Overall, it’s one of the best jobs in the worlds! True, pay is not great (I could earn 10 times more working in a bank, for example), but then money is not everything in life. Most scientists accept this because they are quite idealist — they do their job out of love and passion, not because it will ever make them rich.

Comments