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Asked by must1put to Sharron K, Hayley, Eva A, Bruno Silvester L on 21 Mar 2024.
Question: How would you compare your initial expectations of going into the job, and The workplace you’re immersed in now ?
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Sharron Kenny answered on 21 Mar 2024:
i think it most ways its better than i expected. you realise that those senior scientists youve looked up to are also people too. so its not as scary as it looks from the outside at 1st. i work as part of a great team. we laugh often. work very hard in the areas of science we all specialise in and when we have team meetings some one always brings along cakes and biscuits.
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Bruno Silvester Lopes answered on 25 Mar 2024:
I’ve had a variety of jobs after my PhD which I finished in 2012. To begin with I didn’t have any huge expectations but always wanted to do fascinating work. I worked from 2012 to 2019 in the same place and then after a short break, I joined the current university where I am working as an assistant professor of microbiology. Here as well, I did not have any expectations but I can see I progressed very rapidly in my current role and have been appointed to several prestigious positions across different microbiology societies. I think I always go with the thought that I need to make the best out of wherever I go and help those who can learn from my experience.
Comments
Andrew M commented on :
Moving from university to industry was something of a shock to start with. At Uni, Industry was painted as as the golden land of huge opportunity and endless resource…..not a bit of it, every penny is counted, every cost and benefit weighed against each other. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
Then there was the scale – moving from milligrams in glass tubes to kilos, tens of kilos, hundreds of kilos in metal or plastic buckets, cauldrons and tanks; it was hard to see it as chemistry at all. It took time to realise that, though we wore overalls, bump caps and boots not labcoats, the same chemistry is occuring, now with added complications of physics and engineering- energy imputs from all angles, diffussion and disolution rates and all manner of additional factors we never had to consider on the small scale. So many more additional skills. Not having a well-stocked library (we did have one, mostly stocked with 10yr old copies of the Yellow Pages for every part of the country), making do with the scraps of knowledge not locked away behind publisher paywalls. Learning to work pragmatically, learning how to design and analyse experiments efficiently (factorial is not the only way). Thinking about design space. Learning about metrology, statistical control, variation and repeatability to an extent we’d never considered in our experiments before. Learning, essentially, that our hard-won chemistry knowledge was almost valueless – it was the learning how to be a chemist that was most valuable at uni.
After 20 years, the hardest lesson has been that the knowledge I’ve acquired is now more useful and more valuable to others than the knowledge I could acquire myself. Accepting that aiding, guiding, planning and helping tmy colleagues is more useful than being in the lab myself. I always saw myself as a lab chemist, not a desk jockey, it’s a fight to try to remain so. The thrill of understanding, of problem solving remains the same.