Question: Hi i\'m Laura, What do you do exactly in your job? And are there particular parts to being a scientist, you find difficult? xxx

Greg FitzHarris answered on 13 Jun 2010:

Hi Laura,

Although my job title is ‘lecturer’ I only spend a small amount of time giving lectures (currently about 4 weeks of solid lecturer work-ie. giving lectures and tutorials as well as preparing and marking exams-per year. For the rest of the time I work in my lab. As well as doing the experiments I have to spend a lot of time working out what experiements I need to do, what supplies I need to order for the experiments etc etc I also have to read lots of papers (in scientific journals) written by other scientists in my field to help work out what the most important experiments we need to do are. On top of doing my own experiments, I have a PhD student working in my lab and a Post-doc student (-the position you take after you’ve done your PhD), and i supervise them. I have to check on their work and help them decide what experiments they should be doing. I also sometimes give talks at conferences in order to present my work to other scientists in my field. When I’ve got enough experiments to put into a paper, I spend a lot of time at my computer trying to put together the information. The process of writing and submitting a paper to a journal can go on for ….weeks.

For what do i find difficult…. hmmm… good question.

The difficult part is that experiments often don’t work… or it takes a long time (weeks, months sometimes) to work out exactly how to do an experiment correctly in order to get the most reliable answer to the question in hamd. So, it can be a bit frustrating not feeling as though you have produced any new answers (data) for a while…. but its really exciting when you do discover something new… especially if its not what tyou expected to find!