Question: whats your least favourite part of being a scientist?

Asked by maceyluvs1d to Cindy, Katelin, Kate, Miranda, Yagiz on 11 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by lokroxs2013, disease357, naniasa.

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  1. Photo: Miranda WeenMiranda Ween
    answered on 11 Mar 2013:

    I’m glad you asked this, because ever job has it’s downsides. For me, it is the fact that Australia trains far more scientists than it provides jobs for. This means that when people like me apply for money to do our research, only 3/10 get the money. This money also pays our salary, so we are constantly having to fight and compete against other also awesome scientists for our jobs. And it is not that we have bad projects. For funding for 2013, 2/3 of projects submitted to the national medical health research council were considred projects worthy of funding, but only half were actually given money.

    I love my job, but it does make it hard to buy a house or make long term plans, as you never know when the money will dry up and you have to move interstate or overseas to keep the money coming in.

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  2. Photo: Kate SkulteKate Skulte
    answered on 12 Mar 2013:

    Miranda makes a good point. It is really hard to get funding and I’m not looking foward to that part of my career. However, its not really an issue for me at the moment because I’m still doing my post graduate studies. At the moment I really dislike labelling tubes. Its not too bad when you have a few to do, but sometimes when I get stock liquids in a big bottle, I may have to divide that up into smaller bottles that only contain the amount I would use at one time. Sometimes this can be up to 50 smaller tubes! It doesn’ty take long to divide up the liquid, it takes a lot longer to label it with the date, my name, what it is and another other identifying details I need. It’s necessary but also frustrating because I want to move on to the more fun stuff!

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  3. Photo: Yagiz "Biohacker" Alp AksoyYagiz "Biohacker" Alp Aksoy
    answered on 18 Mar 2013:

    The least favourite part is “ignorance” of public. Most scientists are working day & night and dedicates their lives to come up with invaluable discoveries that could greatly benefit humanity and environment. Some of sacrifice from our lives, families to pursue our research. And we are not doing these to gain popularity or to make billions of dollars. Ironically, we can hardly pay our mortgage (if we are lucky enough to get a continuous funding). However these efforts are either ignored or overlooked by public, politicians and businessmen. It is very painful to see some people think twice when it comes to fund research while same people don’t bother to make long queues in front of mobile phone stores to pay ridiculous amount of money to buy a new version of their smartphones. Neither the company nor public cares it was the scientists who made this technology available to us.This ignorance is the least favourite part of being a scientist…

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