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Asked by anon-201732 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Andy on 5 Mar 2019.
Question: Do you have a Nobel Prize or have earned anything that you are very proud of that maybe other people don't which will make you stand out?
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Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:
No Nobel prizes likely here but I have won a few speaking competitions giving presentations about my research
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Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:
Only a very, very few people have Nobel Prizes. They’ve been awarded once per year since 1901, and a maximum of three at a time. So there have been fewer than 354 Nobel Laureats in physics in the last 118 years.
I’ve got a Royal Society research fellowship, fellowship of the Institute of Physics, and few other minor accolades. They’re more subject-specific, but that almost means more. Maybe, just maybe someday I could do something influential enough to be voted a proper Fellow of the Royal Society — that would mean the most, because it’s recognition by your peers. Here’s hoping…
A last comment: I don’t think many are driven by these trinkets: they are cool if you get them, but it might not mean much if you don’t, and no-one would do this if not for love of the science itself. There are easier ways to get money and adulation 🙂
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Sophia Pells answered on 5 Mar 2019:
A Nobel prize would be very nice but unfortunately I don’t have one. As Andy said, only very few people have ever got one. (Only 3 women have ever got a Nobel prize in physics!) One of my lecturers at Manchester got one for his work on Graphene.
I’m still pretty new to my PhD and my career in general so I haven’t won any awards or things like that. During my degree, I decided to do a year abroad in Madrid and at first I found that really really hard because I was trying to learn physics in Spanish and my Spanish wasn’t great. I’m very proud that I stuck that out because I did consider giving up and going back to Manchester but I convinced myself to stay. In the end I did well in my physics exams and learned lots of Spanish, and had a great year! I think doing that year abroad is something that has made me stand out now.
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Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:
No Nobel Prize for me yet unfortunately (I’d certainly be very proud of that).
I think we’ve all earned the right to be called scientists, for which we’ve had to work hard, and we should be very proud of that. Obviously that doesn’t make us stand out much amongst other scientists, but scientists do stand out positively in everyday life!
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