• Question: What has surprised you the most through your career?

    Asked by anon-220369 on 20 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Shobhana Nagraj

      Shobhana Nagraj answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      Great question! I think what has surprised me the most is finding those amazing researchers who still have the passion and drive to make a difference in this world, and show that it is possible to continue being curious, and work towards making a contribution, even at the very top of your research career! Researchers like this are really inspiring!

    • Photo: Kate Timms

      Kate Timms answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      Oooh, great question. I think what has surprised me the most is how much resilience I have. Science is difficult and there are lots of ups and downs. Often you have to repeat things or your grant gets rejected. Or you just have to work really long hours and get really tired.You need to be resilient to stay optimistic and keep going! So I think I’ve kind of impressed myself in that respect.

    • Photo: Matthew Bareford

      Matthew Bareford answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      I think the most surprising thing for me is how much difference one person can make. Just a different point of view on a small detail can be the difference between making a discovery and missing it. Quite literally proves that collaboration and team work are vitally important

    • Photo: Kaitlin Wade

      Kaitlin Wade answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      I think what has surprised me most is just how effective communication and collaboration is. And how frustrating it is when people don’t communicate well enough in a team effort!

    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 21 Jun 2019:

      Tough question! For me I think it’s that some of the best experiments can cost the least money; there’s a real ‘art’ to keeping science simple, and some of the most amazing discoveries in history, although difficult to crack, have answered a really simple, but fundamentally important question.

    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 25 Jun 2019:

      I think I’ve been surprised the most by how important it is to be creative, imaginative and inventive while doing research in science.
      .
      I was never the most artistic at school and i thought that science was about being practical and thinking logically. And it is but I’ve come to see that bringing creativity to my work helps me visualise whats going on in cells and disease more easily, imagination helps me to hypothesis about what might be going on and imagination helps me to come up with really cool experiments that will answer the questions I’ve got about my research.

    • Photo: Deepak Chandrasekharan

      Deepak Chandrasekharan answered on 28 Jun 2019:

      How excited, keen and generous people are with their time. I used to be terrified of e-mailing a VIP big important professor, but most are just nice people who love science and although busy, want to help too!

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