• Question: before you found your job, did you know it existed?

    Asked by sachi on 19 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Jonny Coates

      Jonny Coates answered on 19 Jan 2022:

      Yes but I definitely didn’t know some of the topics existed. For example the metaresearch I do was not something that I was aware of until I actually started doing it!

    • Photo: Chris Budd

      Chris Budd answered on 20 Jan 2022:

      I have had quite a few jobs in my career. My current job is called ‘Director of knowledge exchange’ at the University of Bath. I actually created this job for myself as it didn’t exist (at Bath) before.

    • Photo: Victoria Cox

      Victoria Cox answered on 20 Jan 2022:

      At school I definitely didn’t know my job existed. I thought I would be a biologist or a chemist or mathematician etc, using only one of whichever science I chose to study at university. This is untrue, and in fact most science jobs are hugely interdisciplinary e.g. I use biology, maths and coding every day. There are so many cool jobs out there (and there will be many more that potentially don’t even exist yet when you are in the job market) so it’s good to keep your options open and a look out for whatever you are interested in!

    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 20 Jan 2022:

      No, my current job is sequencing positive Covid samples! Not only did we not know a pandemic was coming, but when I was studying, the sequencing technology was nowhere near ready to do anything like what we’re doing now. The ability to do this has exploded exponentially.

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 21 Jan 2022:

      Hi Sachi,

      That’s a great question! I think when I started to study Biology at Uni I still didn’t have much of an idea what scientists do on a day to day basis and what different jobs are out there in the field. I would say I sort of grew into it, but people who have scientists in their family already of course have a huge advantage. So if you don’t have that, formats like this are great so you can ask many questions to get a better idea of how scientists work to figure out if you are interested in doing sth like this yourself or not 🙂

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