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Asked by 352genb22 to Barbara, Matt, Ravinder, Sophie, Tristan on 6 Mar 2015.
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Matthew Moore answered on 6 Mar 2015:
It’s actually really cool. You get to learn as much as you want about a topic you’re interested in for 3 to 4 years (and beyond hopefully)! Whether like me, you spend your time at a computer working with genetic data, or working in the laboratory it’s certainly not a regular job and by the end you could know more about your chosen topic than anyone else, anywhere!
As you said, hopefully this research will also be of some benefit in the future. In genetics this might be identifying genes that go wrong and cause cancer or sequencing the Neanderthal genome and finding out about our evolutionary history or identifying the genes in bacteria that produce toxins and cause disease.
To find some area of research, whether it directly contributes to medicine (which is often the focus) or not, you have an opportunity to increase knowledge of that topic, to research and find things out that aren’t in the textbook because nobody knows yet!
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Barbara Shih answered on 7 Mar 2015:
Carrying out research is fun, stressful, frustrating and rewarding.
In my opinion, the fun never stops. There is always something new, either something you hear from other researchers or something that you found in your data. There is never really a “correct” answer, just a lot of back and forth debate on the most likely explanation and how you can convince others that is the case.Research can be very stressful. Often things simply don’t work, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes other people’s reported finding disagree with what you found. Sometimes your grant budget does not permit you to do what you really want to do.
It is frustrating at times, largely due to job security. The career ladder of a pure research career is not straightforward, and most research jobs are contracts from a few months to 3 years. It’s not uncommon for people to have a better salary and job prospect with and undergraduate degree and 4 years work experience, rather than a PhD.
Last but not least, research is very rewarding. You often hear people saying “you don’t do research for the pay”. Research used to be rich people’s hobby. It’s just very satisfying when you finally found something significant, published your results, and see that people considered your finding in their research. That’s when all the hard work is worth it.
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Sophie Robinson answered on 10 Mar 2015:
Very good question. People’s experience in research can range from fun and exciting to frustrating and stressful. Experiments can be very unpredictable and often don’t work out the way you’d hope. You can spend weeks ploughing away at an experiment and not get anywhere with it. That being said, sometimes experiments produce excellent results that have the potential to, like you said, benefit science and out future.
One great thing about doing research is to some extent you can work on what you like, as long as you have a particular goal in mind that is likely to make some sort of positive impact. It is great being right at the front of your field and publishing new information that no one else is working on
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