• Question: do you work on your own?

    Asked by 893rgah46 to Craig, Devon, Marta, Natalie, Nicholas on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Nicholas Younger

      Nicholas Younger answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I am part of 2 labs, but I’m the only person that does the work I do, so I often end up on my own for a while. But I can always ask for help and my lab and office is filled with people to chat to.

    • Photo: Marta Varela

      Marta Varela answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      Mostly yes. My project is individual and although there are some people that work on similar things and that I talk to a lot, we don’t split tasks or get together to work on the same things.

      Science is a social endeavour, though, so a lot of your time is spent communicating your ideas and your findings to other people. This is most often done through writing articles in journals, but some times you have to travel to nice exotic places with all expenses paid and chat to other scientists. As you can imagine that is not one of the hardest parts of the job! Another nice part of a scientist’s work is talking to non-scientists, like yourself, about what we do!

    • Photo: Craig O'Hare

      Craig O'Hare answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      Yes and no.

      I work as part of a team. While we all individually work on different projects, each one is focused on immunity to viruses. Sometimes we work together to solve problems with techniques and equipment in the lab. Once every two weeks we present our results to one another and our boss and discuss what all our data might mean or talk about new research papers relevant to our research that might have come out.

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