• Question: Is there any projects that you just hated doing or didn't enjoy? and if there was what was it

    Asked by anon-40031 on 9 Nov 2022.
    • Photo: Vincent Monchal

      Vincent Monchal answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      Yes, I participate during covid to few events that were complete circus. The first one was for science week, Trinity College Dublin was asking scientist to submit their ideas to potentially being selected to animate a stand on the campus science week event. They didn’t really listen to my proposition and wanted me to record a presentation video of my project instead, I found it completely off subject and irrelevant for science week, so I quit it.
      The second one was supposed to be an online conference by an international organisation called EGU, a really big deal for me inducing some stress to do well on that conference. We were supposed to have 2 minutes presentation and then some question on our presentation for at least 30 minutes. That conference was a shame because it was full of bugs and it ended up by not being able to do it because they didn’t anticipate the number of people attending to that conference, which was obviously huge as it was an international conference. Servers of the rooms have crashed, no access to any chat whatsoever and they didn’t want to give us back to money we paid for attending to that conference, I will never go back to any conference of that organisation.

    • Photo: Muhammad Farhan Khan

      Muhammad Farhan Khan answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      As I scientist , sometimes you get such projects which you are not interested in. I also got that one during my First Research Job, It was a bit different from my area of interest. It was related to investigation of low back pain using Bio-mechanical model. I guess as it was a different to my past experience I wasn’t able to develop interest. But I still give my best and did it an published 8 research paper’s out of it and it helped me in learning some amazing concepts of engineering and cross disciplinary research.

    • Photo: Anna Desmond

      Anna Desmond answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      There wasn’t a project that I hated but sometimes when I’m doing experiments that need to be repeated again and again and again or if I’m doing the same time every day, it can be boring. But most of the time I’m doing different experiments every day or every week.

    • Photo: Ingmar Schoen

      Ingmar Schoen answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      Repetitive tasks can be very annoying. For example, going through hundreds of images by hand to measure how large a cell is drives you crazy at a certain point. The good coming from that is that I get so impatient that I think hard how we can automate the task. So the frustration often leads to new inventions that assist us to do the research more efficiently. In the above case, we came up with computer algorithms that analysed the images for us.

    • Photo: Ciara Buckley

      Ciara Buckley answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      I agree with my colleagues that the repetitive tasks can be annoying, although no one project stands out that I disliked.

    • Photo: Vanessa Rodrigues

      Vanessa Rodrigues answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      As a scientist, we also learn how to learn. Completing a project in record time requires good planning for the distribution of tasks. We have to find ways to finish an experiment, and then share the science with other scientists outside our own research group by, maybe, traveling to conference. Then, We do not always have all the equipment needed to complete a scientific study and we have to find another science group who can help. I feel irritable when more than one task overlaps on the timeline because it slows down the pace of the project.

    • Photo: Cristina Cuesta Marti

      Cristina Cuesta Marti answered on 30 Nov 2022:


      No, not so far! I have been pretty lucky and fortunate doing research and projects that I really enjoy!

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