• Question: what ever interested you in been a scientist?x

    Asked by ging to Chris, Simone, Carys, Jeremy, Katherine on 20 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by mattandsam, benandajay10, findingnemo379, 08kstewartwilkin41, toesandfingers, pet466, annaemma, issey1999, odonoghue, niall11, samandaashishlgs.
    • Photo: Christopher Phillips

      Christopher Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I’ve always loved mysteries, unanswered questions, strange new ideas and really, really weird stuff – The cool thing about science is that it has it all! 🙂
      Science is about being confronted with a mystery or seeing something strange and then trying to understand and explain it. I always thought that was really cool that we could actually explain some of the strangest things in the universe. We can all understand the weird and wonderful, you don’t have to be a scientist to do it – we are all scientists, everyt ime you ask a question and try to find an answer.. you are doing science! 🙂
      That’s what got me into science.

    • Photo: Carys Cook

      Carys Cook answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Science rocks man! I just love so much doing a job where not only am I finding out really cool things that no other human being knows, but I am helping us a species understand the universe more and our place in it. Since I was a kid I was always fascinated by space and dinosaurs and stuff like that. I was not the best science student in the world – in fact I didnt do very well at chemistry at A-Level, but ended up doing it as my job! Being a scientist is definately a labour of love, meaning the pay isnt great but it is so rewarding I never want a normal job ever again! 😀

    • Photo: Jeremy Green

      Jeremy Green answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I’m fascinated by all sorts of things – not only science but other subjects too – but when I was deciding what A-levels to do I thought that it would be easier to understand non-science without studying it at school than to understand science without doing it at school. Once I started studying it hard, I got really into it and I know how awesome it really is and how it helps me understand the world.

    • Photo: Katherine Jones

      Katherine Jones answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I always liked science lessons at school, especially the ones with experiments in. I thought that was a lot more fun than just listening to the teacher! I decided the best way to pick my A levels at school was to pick the subjects I liked the most. Then I was really lucky to have a great chemistry teacher – he was fun, but also he explained things in a way that made sense.

      After that, I have always liked doing chemistry and being a chemist. Because I find doing practicals fun, and also because I like the challenge of solving problems.

    • Photo: Simone Bijvoet

      Simone Bijvoet answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      What I love about science is that you can study a small amount of people or cells for example, and based on the things you find in this small group, you can make predictions on what it will be like for a whole bigger group.

      I remember the first time when I was involved in science, we had to do a project for school when I was 16. Me and a friend made our own tests to measure how good peoples short-term memory (up to 30 sec) and long-term memory (longer than 30 sec) was. We did these tests on about 20 people of different ages and then made graphs to see if there were any differences between people of different ages. It turned out that younger people had a lot better long-term memory, something that we had read about in books just before. I thought it was so amazing that we actually found the same results that others had found before us as well. That’s what made me enthusiastic about science.

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