• Question: What is the hardest part about your job and the most difficult thing you have ever had to do surrounding your job?

    Asked by anon-201693 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 4 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201659, anon-201616.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      The hardest thing about my job is that I’ve spent 3 years working on it and it doesn’t look positive that I’ll have a really successful outcome. That makes motivating myself really difficult!

      The most difficult thing was changing from a physics background to a materials science subject which is very focused on chemistry. I’ve had to learn crystallography and loads of chemistry that most my peers would say is simple but was actually very tough for me

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      The hardest thing for me now is getting time to follow up all the science ideas that seem interesting to me! I really like my teaching and mentoring jobs, but there’s something special about having an idea and then personally checking out whether it’s right.

      The most difficult things are probably not “science”, but managing the lots of people on our big experiments: thousands of people, lots to organise, and sometimes things flare up. I think on the pure science side, partly because I flit between areas, I’m often behind the curve on the mathematical ideas and have to work to catch up. Particularly some of the statistical methods that we use are a whole subject in themselves, and quite hard to get your head around until you try it out for yourself. I spent a year or so writing little stats programs in my spare time to get a feel for it… but it worked in the end!

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Research is hard, typically things don’t go to plan. For instance, if your research relies on a particular machine and this machine breaks, you can’t do anything! This means organisation is really important for a scientist, you need to plan your experiments and be as productive as possible with your time on working equipment.

      I once spent a month making a component for a quantum computer, but I broke it on the final step. This still makes me annoyed to this day. Anyway, I managed to make another one in half the time and it was all fine in the end. With any job, bouncing back from mistakes is the most important thing to do.

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      When you do a PhD, you have to study something that no one has ever studied before. That means that when you get stuck or something doesn’t work, you can’t just look in a book or on google for the answer. Things never seem to go to plan in research, so I am always having to try and solve problems which can be very frustrating, but also makes research exciting (I think so anyway).

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I think the hardest thing for me might be the fact that there are thousands of scientists on my experiment. This means that it can sometimes be difficult to keep everyone happy, and internal politics might come into play.
      Having said that, the size of my experiment is also one of my favourite aspects of the job.
      The best thing the size brings is international diversity. See this map that shows the nationalities of CERN users https://cds.cern.ch/record/2302064/?ln=no.
      What’s beautiful is that people from various backgrounds, cultures, religions, faiths, nationalities, beliefs… are working together towards a common scientific goal. People who’s countries are at war against each other, can still work together peacefully. I honestly believe that CERN should be a model to the rest of the world of how international collaboration can work.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Similar to what the others have said, I think the hardest thing is picking yourself up when things aren’t going well. But really even finding out how things don’t work and what theories aren’t right is still useful information, it’s part of how science works. So when I feel like this I just go have a cup of tea, remind myself of the overall aim and why I’m doing everything, and have another go.

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