• Question: Is science stressfull?

    Asked by 9roda to Andrew, Ash, Gem, Paige, SJ on 25 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      YES. Science, especially science in the laboratory can be very rewarding, but also very stressful. Imagine for months at a time, making tiny tweeks to an experiment that doesn’t work time and time again. That gets very stressful! You are trying to problem solve and figure out why it isn’t working… then maybe one day you make a breakthrough, and you are jumping for joy in the lab! That part is the part that scientists live for, but the times in between can get very discouraging. Not all research is like this, but much of basic scientific research IS like this… it requires a LOT of patience. But then again, you are discovering things that nobody before you has discovered! That takes time and… again… patience.

    • Photo: Gemma Staite

      Gemma Staite answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Yes. Everything can be stressful, but I think this is particularly true for research science, where you may or may not get any results.

      In my work the science isn’t very stressful. Even if the organisms don’t do what we expect, we can easily work around it and try other things. It is more limited, so eventually we will get an answer or we can admit defeat, for example if the organism has died. There are still options for the Doctors or we can try again with a fresh sample.

    • Photo: SarahJayne Boulton

      SarahJayne Boulton answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      I think a lot of people find science based work stressful, but praise be I’m not one of them.

      I kinda of take the time to plan things out, fill the day up and give myslef the time I need to get the work done – if an experiment takes 5 hours to run, whats the point of stressing out about the results after 3 hours? It’s not going to make to task run any faster?

      What is stressful though is the fact that you often don’t know where you’ll be in a years time, you can have a plan of what you’d like to do, but it doesn’t always mean you’ll get to do it.

      Lots of science is funded by research councils, like the Wellcome Trust who have kindly funded ‘I’m A Scientist’… in order to get to money to do work you have to write a document called a ‘proposal’ that says what you want to do and how you’ll do it. If the funders decide they don’t want to fund it then you’ve no money to do you work – or indeed be paid.

      So finding research funding can be stressful, but the work is a delight. 🙂

    • Photo: Ashley Cadby

      Ashley Cadby answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Yes, it can be sometimes when things need to be done in a hurry and yet you still have to be very careful it can get stressful. I think one of my biggest worries is that someone will come up with and idea and publish it before we do, so we would waste all the work we have done. It generally only counts if you do it first in science.

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