• Question: Do you ever get bored of all the meetings, paperwork and programming you all seem to be doing on a day to day basis?

    Asked by yangh to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Sometimes it is boring, yes. (Particularly the paper work!) But the exciting parts of the job, like discovering new things and talking about ideas with colleagues more than make up for it 🙂

      Generally I don’t find meetings boring because I like talking to people. I don’t find programming boring either, but some scientists hate programming! They can choose to do more hands on experiments instead of lots of programming.

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Not really because there’s so much variation in all the meetings and programming! Science is a journey of discovery, finding new things out all of the time so you don’t usually repeat things much. Whatever you work on one day will be based on what you learn the previous day so it can all be very new!

    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Yes and no. Occasionally they (paperwork and meeting) do get a bit overwhelming, but mostly I end up learning stuff from meetings.

      It is said that at CERN, there are so many meetings, that people formed a committee to find ways to reduce the number of meetings. And the first thing they do is arrange more meetings to do it!

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Good question!

      Sometimes I do get bored of the paperwork, but its usually necessary to keep track of stuff.

      Most of the meetings are interesting. The best ones are with other scientists, like the one I was at in Switzerland last week. There you discuss ideas about science or some science done, and you usually end up thinking of new science to do with the other people there.

      I like computer programming. The programming I’m doing is always to help me understand the science, by predicting what I should see or calculating what my latest scientific findings mean.

      So the answer is sometimes, sometimes, and no 🙂

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      If I were to do it every day then I would probably find it boring. However I get to spend some of my time at my lab bench doing ‘wet-lab’ work so having a mixture of things to do means I don’t really ever get bored!

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