• Question: why did you pick to become a scientist? what do you like about sc?

    Asked by LilyLawson to MarthaNari, Jonny, Alison, Paul on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Kawaii Potato Cat Molly, Joey, copper(rose gold), piglet, 872utec38, wendy, MK, Foridaz, Ricky&Rahidul.
    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Hi Lily, it actually took me a while to decide to become a scientist. (Sorry I didn’t have time to answer properly during the chat! 🙂 )
      I guess the first thing was that at some point towards the end of school I noticed that I liked thinking about ‘systems’. I just liked imagining lots of individual parts interacting dynamically and all influencing each other to build a whole. Like in orchestras, ant colonies, ocean currents…. I absolutely wasn’t sure what to do with that though, and I also had a lot of other interests like acting and education. So I started studying psychology because it had ‘a bit of everything’.
      And then I did an internship at the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research and felt totally awesome there. Part of it was the feeling of freedom and adventure because no one had ever done what we were trying to do – so there are no right or wrong answers and no safety ropes. Also, the brain is a beautiful system, and finding a good way to express how all those neurons influence each other is a scientific thing, but it also needs you to look at the problem in a pretty artistic way. You really need to find new ways of expressing this system – maybe more in numbers than in, say, paint, but it’s still a very creative process. That’s why I decided to stay with neuroscience at that point – it’s one of the newest branches of science, so you need loads of creativity to fill in the huge gaps in our knowledge.

    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      I became a scientist because I was doing maths and a lady told me that I could use maths to help her solve some problems in Biochemistry. That lady is now my supervisor, Elspeth Garman (you can Google her). So I didn’t know that I was going to be a scientist.

      I love applying my maths to science and trying to answer questions that no one else has answered before.
      I also like trying to do things that will help benefit lives of people

    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      Well, originally I got some really bad careers advice from my school careers advisor, who told me there were no jobs in history (there are quite a few…) and that I shouldn’t study that. So I chose to do chemistry instead, because I was good at it, and I thought it might give me the opportunity to do something really cool like discover a new medicine, and I’ve not looked back. I still love history, but I really enjoy chemistry as well.

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