• Question: how does being a sciencest affect your life?

    Asked by saraha to David, James, Mike, Suze, Will on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by aishai, sarahi.
    • Photo: Mike Dodd

      Mike Dodd answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      It does mean that I have strange work hours. I tend to start early (6/7) and finish when I want. It makes me think a lot about the world around me, which means I daydream sometimes/a lot!! But most of all it means I have fun, experimenting in the lab looking into ideas or trying to figure out what happened next.

    • Photo: James Marrow

      James Marrow answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      My wife tells me I give far too much information when she asks me a question! 🙂

      On the more serious side, I find I’m less likely to trust what I hear in the news about anything (if you’ve ever heard anything reported that you know something about, then you realise how little correct information is ever given on a news programme!)

    • Photo: Suze Kundu

      Suze Kundu answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I don’t think I can answer this one! I guess that actually, being a scientist gives me more flexibility than a ‘normal’ job would, but that doesn’t have an effect on my life as such. I’m stuck! This is the first question I’ve not been able to answer, even if I try and read up on it! Good work @saraha!

    • Photo: William Eborall

      William Eborall answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi aishai. I think that like James being a scientist makes me sometimes give long answers to people when a short one would do. It also makes me over think things sometimes which can be quite annoying when you catch yourself doing it.

      But on the brighter side it makes me question things carefully. Like James said, you learn to take the news with a big pinch of salt because many things reported are either wrong or made to sound different to how they actually are by using different language to talk about them. It also makes me very sceptical of tv adverts for things like shampoo – have you ever noticed that when they say “90% of women think it’s great!” that at the bottom of the screen it will say how many women they actually asked. That number is usually very small – can you really tell if something is great by asking 7 women?

    • Photo: David Ingram

      David Ingram answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I sometime work strange hours. I travel internationally a lot (been to Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea, USA, Canada, and Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal) in the last three years, and my family complain we talk about weird things at the dinner table.

      I have learned to stop giving lectures at the table though!

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