Your hours aren’t always 9-5, so being a scientist can be tiring! Not to mention that if you are a researcher, you are regularly trying to convince people your work is worth financing and paying for – that can be really exhausting too!
For me it’s keeping up to date with all the new discoveries and innovations. I work across a lot of areas in the chemical sciences, I work with a lot of different people and would class myself as a chemistry generalist rather than a specialist. This means it’s quite tricky to keep up with all the different innovations and developments because I am working with people across all of chemistry (biological, inorganic, organic, physical, computational, analytical). I also have my own interests, I like biological chemistry which means I am more likely to look into discoveries in that area!
Working for months on a proposal to do something interesting, but then it does not get approval or funding because there’s not enough money to go around.
Great question! For me, the hardest part is that your career feels like a rollercoaster. Sometimes your climbing up and everything feels really fun and exciting, and sometimes it comes crashing down and you can be stuck for a while. Lots of highs, but also a few lows. If you love what you do, you’ll always get through it.
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Katie K commented on :
Great question! For me, the hardest part is that your career feels like a rollercoaster. Sometimes your climbing up and everything feels really fun and exciting, and sometimes it comes crashing down and you can be stuck for a while. Lots of highs, but also a few lows. If you love what you do, you’ll always get through it.