• Question: How do you feel about students asking you about your job?

    Asked by hepworth99 to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Artem Evdokimov

      Artem Evdokimov answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      I think this is fantastic – I hope that more people get to experience a one-on-one interaction with a practicing scientist. Science keeps our society alive, literally (think medicines without which most of us will not make it past the age of 45!) and it’s a shame that society tends to pay less attention to the benefits of science and pays a lot of attention to the ‘scary’ aspects.

      So please, ask many questions 🙂

    • Photo: Matt Gunther

      Matt Gunther answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      I love students asking about my job as it makes the public more aware of my research and its impact. Remember, without the public, there would be no imperative for me to conduct my research in the first place.

      By showing students what I do in a simply way, I get a great deal of satisfaction!

    • Photo: Caroline Dalton

      Caroline Dalton answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      I think its great, its why I wanted to take part. It’s nice to be able to show students what its like to be a scientist and what we do, and to hear all the great questions. A lot of them are things I haven’t thought about in a long time as you tend to get very involved in your specific area of science and stop thinking so much about other areas. So its nice to be pulled back into looking at a wider picture 🙂

    • Photo: John Short

      John Short answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      The more students that ask me about my job the better, as people seem to have certain stereotypes about what we scientists do, but also seem to think that we don’t get out much!

      My research and most other peoples at university is paid for by the public taxpayers money, so we really have an obligation to talk about what do as well.

      Plus, as mentioned previously, newspapers often kick up a storm about things , or print inaccurate information or have opinions based not on fact but for other reasons – so the more students and the public hear about what we do and why the more you can make better decisions about we find out, what research we do and what we do with new technologies such as genetic modification, IVF etc

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