• Question: how did you first start of as a scientist meaning the things you investergated....??

    Asked by scientiststacey12 to Nick, Lilly, Francesca, Deepak, Alan on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The first time I properly was able to investigate something without doing it just to learn techniques or stuff for an exam was at university. I got to grow some cells in flasks and look at how they behaved with and without certain genes. It was really cool because I could stain different parts of them different colours and look at them under microscopes to try and work out what they were doing. As it was my first bit of investigating on my own I felt really proud that I got some answers (one set of cells were bigger and flatter!). It seems like a really simple idea but took weeks of planning and experiments to prove!

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      When I started as a scientist, I was at a University studying a comet called Halley’s Comet. It only comes close to the Sun and Earth once every 76 years, so me and other astronomers had to get it right 😀

      I measured the type of ice and gas there was in Halley’s comet. This meant flying to the Canary Islands to use the big telescopes there. Then I returned back to England and analysed the data to make the measurements. It was fun, even though all the science took over 2 years to finish!

    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I think the first time I did something which was not in my textbook was when I did a summer project during my masters. My supervisor gave me a set of really complicated equations to solve which described some physics, but unlike before, he said none knows the solution. So that was my first experience with real research, where you try to find something which nobody knows the answer of.

      It took a few months to solve those, but the satisfaction I got from that was worth the effort!

    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The first thing I investigated was during a summer project right after I finished school. I was in a team trying to understand how plants decide when and where to make branches.

      This sounds quite different to the particle physics I am doing now! Lots of the same skills and techniques (like maths and computer programming) are used in very different areas of science though. One of the things I like about science is being able to investigate lots of different things like this. 🙂

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      When I first started out as a scientist I worked with someone at the University of Cambridge studying a massive star that had created a beautiful nebula around itself and we wanted to understand how it had done that. During that short research project I learnt a lot of skills that I still use today!

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