• Question: What is your main goal to achieve in your career and how do you motivate yourself to follow that(are there any end results you really enjoy seeing)?

    Asked by anon-201695 to Sophia, Meirin, Andy on 15 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 15 Mar 2019:


      During my career I hope I learn many new and interesting things. Some of these things will be new to only me, others I hope will be new to everyone on Earth! Importantly though, I want to then share what I’ve learnt with others, this is the real motivation for me. What I love seeing the most is a smile on someone’s face when they’re genuinely interested to hear about my work. I love it even more when this is a young person, who could then be inspired to follow science!

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 15 Mar 2019:


      I just want to do cool and interesting stuff, so I learn things and have fun, while helping us (humanity!) to discover new things about our universe. I don’t have any one great research summit I want to climb… more about the journey than the destination, as they say. Some people are very different and really want to discover some new thing; I’m more motivated by the methods being interesting. This explains why I don’t like being a manager very much: meetings might be necessary to take the big project forward, but in secret that’s not the thing that drives me *eek*

      Separately from the research, I really want to be a good physics educator. It’s not easy: there are hard concepts, and everyone learns or has conceptual trouble in different ways. I think/hope I’m still getting better…

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 15 Mar 2019:


      At the moment my main career goals are to get my PhD and to get my first research paper published. I find the area I am researching really interesting so it is quite easy to keep myself motivated 🙂

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