• Question: how hard is your job

    Asked by anon-214090 to Helen, Farah, Dave, Cheryl, Bastian, Alun on 11 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Dave Underhill

      Dave Underhill answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      anything worth doing isn’t easy in my opinion 🙂 like anything there are generally two routes, the easy route or the more challenging one – I find the more you put in the more you get out 🙂

    • Photo: Farah Elahi

      Farah Elahi answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      Completing a PhD is difficult. Doing a piece of research on your own is very difficult especially when you have limited resources and funding, which is what a PhD is about. But my dad always used to say to me that if you enjoy doing something, then that’s half the battle done 🙂 So although it is hard, I wouldn’t swap it for anything else.

    • Photo: Cheryl Williams

      Cheryl Williams answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      My job can be hard at times, I have done a lot of training to get to where I am now, so the tasks I do are second nature. I have to problem-solve a lot, and this can be hard at times, trying to find an answer…

    • Photo: Helen Faulkner

      Helen Faulkner answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      My job is actually quite easy.
      I spend most of my time making up solutions (by mixing chemicals into water and adding solvents) or preparing samples ready for analysis by dissolving them in the solutions I’ve made.
      Most things are run on HPLC (I learned this as high performance liquid chromatography but I think it’s also called high pressure chromatography) which is connected to software in my laptop. This does a lot of the analytical interpretation for me but I still have to check the interpretations and calculate the final result.
      My job can be hard when something fails as I then need to figure out if there’s something wrong with the batch or if (more likely) I made a mistake preparing everything.
      Planning workloads can also be hard when there is a lot of stuff that needs testing. We have to work with a lot of other departments to make sure the most urgent testing is prioritised while still getting everything else done. It can mean a few late nights at the office 🙂

    • Photo: Alun Owen

      Alun Owen answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      My role is a real mixed bag, out of term time it’s a lot more quiet (as there are no students) but it then gives me time to sort out and repair equipment. Test new practicals and do my own research. During term time it can be quite stressful with field trips, classes etc but I love the challenge.

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