Question: what made it possible to achieve your goals as a scientist?

Nina Rzechorzek answered on 14 Jun 2019:

There are still many more goals I want to achieve as a scientist (most of them actually!), but so far these things have helped:

curiosity, persistence, resilience, self-motivation, being very organised, hard work, lots of supportive people who taught me well and gave me the opportunities to train in science and develop as a clinician-scientist, looking after my physical and mental wellbeing, learning how to share my work and communicate it to all sorts of people, adapting to both team work and independent working situations, learning how to ‘fail well’ – it’s the best education you can get.

Essential: it’s important to have range of different mentors; those who will really help pick you up when things have gone wrong (usually people who are not directly involved in your work), and those who may not necessarily tell you what you want to hear – it feels good to work with positive and optimistic people, just try not to surround yourself only with people that think/say everything you do is great – even for the most successful scientists this is never true. You need to have some mentors that keep you grounded and give you constructive criticism – it’s the only way to progress as a scientist and ensure that your work is the best it can be.

Finally, in the clinical world, we have a saying ‘see one, do one, teach one,’ – sometimes the best way to test your knowledge and understanding of something is to explain it to someone else – this is a ‘win-win’ for teaching and learning and an unrivalled opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists.