• Question: to be a successful scientist do you have to have a stong background education? moreover, how did you get into the scientist buisness?

    Asked by 10toyetunji to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 9 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by slenderman.
    • Photo: Sophie Holles

      Sophie Holles answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      I think a strong background education helps, but there are many ways you can be a successful scientist. I think one of the main important things is to have new ideas and to have the balls to try things out, to think up new things you want to do or what matters to you, think about how to do a fair test, talk to a lot of people about it and most of all just do it!

      I started out wanting to be an artist, I did art, drama and dance as my GCSEs, then I did Biology and Chemistry A levels, partly because I was interested in it, partly because my teachers were cool. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so I traveled for a year before doing a degree in ‘Natural Sciences’ because it was really broad.. realised I was just really interested in zoology (the study of animals) so I converted my degree after a year, I was pretty average at my exams at uni but I did really well in my 3rd year project and got really high marks, because I loved it so I worked really hard at it (that was the project where I was studying monkey calls in Indonesia). My supervisor liked my work so he encouraged me to get in touch with my supervisor that I still work with, 3 years later.. So I would have to say that inspiring teachers and mentors along with finding out what I really enjoyed and working hard at that because it was fun, is what got me into being a scientist!

    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      Most scientists you meet will have been to university, so yes, a good education can definitely help you to get in to science. But you’d be surprised how many people in science weren’t the ‘clever kids’ at school! I did terribly at maths and I know this is something a lot of people struggle with. Now my work has a heavy maths and physics background! Research takes dedication and passion more than being particularly good at any subject. So if you are interested in science and want to learn and have a curious mind, you’re off to a really good start!

      Science was my favorite subject at school – I thought maybe I’d like to be a vet or an engineer (I really wanted to build roller coasters!) or maybe even work for NASA. I struggled with physics and maths, and found geography (particularly weather and climate and natural disasters like earthquakes) very interesting, so I chose an environmental science degree at university. This gave me lots of options to choose what I was interested in and after that I ended up doing a masters degree in oceanography. I figured out that the oceans are responsible for so much of how our planet works, that it would be a good idea to focus on them. After my masters I travelled and learnt how to scuba dive (it’s good to remember why you love what you do after you’ve been studying for a long time) and then decided I’d like to live abroad and started looking for suitable PhD programs in other countries. A PhD is like a trial run at doing research. We don’t go to lectures, in fact now I’m starting to teach younger students! From a PhD you learn how you come up with new ideas and test them to add to all the things we know in science. Hopefully this will lead me to a research job either at a university, or who knows, maybe even with NASA!

    • Photo: Nathan Green

      Nathan Green answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I never thought I’d be a scientist. I was never top of the class at school and I always thought I was too cool to be a nerd (wrongly!). I just kept doing what I enjoyed. I went to university to do a degree, then i did a masters then a PhD so now I’m a doctor but I never planned on it. Success means different things to different people but I think it means doing something that you love and usually when you’re really into something it just happens that you get quite good at it too.

    • Photo: Jason King

      Jason King answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      The most important thing is to be interested in what you’re doing. If you are, then it won’t seem much easier, and you won’t mind working hard to get better at it. As the others have said, there are lots of different ways to be a scientist – it doesn’t have to be hard-core maths, you could study animal behaviours or something much more observational. We also need scientists to help translate some of the really clever stuff into things that mere mortals can understand, so being the best at school exams isn’t always the best way to find out who’s going to be the most successful.

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