• Question: Did you ever feel like giving up on science?

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      Asked by Darcy_05 to Angus on 19 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Angus Cook

        Angus Cook answered on 19 Jun 2016:

        There are sometimes days where things aren’t going right. It might be that I can’t get an experiment working properly, that the samples I’ve spent 3 days preparing aren’t right in the end, that the temperature chamber decides to break halfway through an experimental run, when I’ve gotten a report back from my supervisor with more corrections, and it’s the 10th draft I’ve sent her.

        Things can go poorly, and when that happens I try my best to figure out how I can get it better next time, to prevent me having to go through the bad things again.

        One of the things that keeps me going is that I really like the project that I’m working on. There will be (and have been) setbacks on the way, but I still think that doing the research that I’m doing is worthwhile.

    Comments

    • Photo: Jenni

      Jenni commented on :

      Yes. I very nearly gave up when my children were very little and I was finding it hard to do do so many things all at once. As well as science I do lots of science teaching at my university where adults come to learn to be scientists. I nearly decided to move completely to doing teaching and stop doing my own science. But now I’m glad that I kept doing science as we’ve done some really cool experiments recently that help us understand how people’s brains work.