• Question: how did you become a scientist?

    Asked by gedy to Alessandro, Angela, Claudia, Marina, Phil on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by tessa7777, binkyboo, 05nfernandes.
    • Photo: Phillip Wilkinson

      Phillip Wilkinson answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      Great question. But it depends what you mean by ‘scientist’. For some its an image of a person in a white coat working with boiling liquids in overflowing test tubes and beakers in some dingy laboratory.

      For me, a scientist is someone who loves to ask questions. Its the basis of scientific inquiry, to ask questions about ourselves and the universe around us. So I think I’ve always been a scientist because even at school I asked a lot of questions. Which annoyed a lot of teachers because they sometimes didn’t know the answer. But that’s fine. A great scientist loves questions we don’t know the answer to yet.

    • Photo: Claudia Krehl

      Claudia Krehl answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      What a great answer by Phil!

      I don’t think any of us in the digital zone have any resemblance to Albert Einstein or people in lab coats 🙂 I think another fantastic reason for being a scientist is pushing the boundaries and wanting to discover new things about how the world works. For me that is the most exciting thing! You always have to strive to find a gap in current knowledge so that what you, as a scientist, are working on is original.

      If you are asking when I first considered being a scientist in the sense of when I first considered research as a career, it was not until I was in the middle of my Masters degree at University. It is not something I had even thought about until I was in the middle of my second big project at university and my supervisor suggested I should think about doing a PhD. But the thought of working on a single research project for 3 to 4 years to get a doctor title seemed scary at first. But as soon as I started I have come to love it!

    • Photo: Marina De Vos

      Marina De Vos answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Great answers.
      I think I became a scientist in my final year of university when I found an error in a publication. First I could not believe there was an error. Surely I must have made a mistake. But no, there error was there. For my dissertation (final year project) I work on resolving the error. I enjoyed that process so much that I wanted more of it. So I stayed a scientist.

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