• Question: What makes you different to the other scientists?

    Asked by Nikki0333 to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 14 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by roirry, lucy, Katie, Ananya.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Well, that depends on what you mean by different! I could say I’m slightly bonkers, but that would just make me the same as other scientists. And I would also say that I stick at things for ages – but that too is pretty much a regular characteristic of a scientist. I’m absolutely not confrontational. So in that I do differ from the hard-nosed go-getting lot. But generally, we are all pretty similar. We just want to find stuff out and understand.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I think all scientists have their own unique set of interests that make them unique! (This is true of everyone, scientists just happen to also all like science.) I try and learn languages in my spare time, and I try and talk to people about science, and I have a whole bunch of other side things. What makes me unique is that I have all of these things at once!

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      If you think of a scientist, you might think of someone who does experiments in a lab, or goes out to do fieldwork, or looks through a telescope, or something along those lines!

      What makes me different to a lot of other scientists is that I don’t do any experiments, I just do maths and think about things. What makes me different from a mathematician is that I’m still trying to use maths to understand real things, rather than just studying maths because it’s cool. What makes me different to the other scientists in this zone is that (as far as I can tell!) I’m the only one who studies physics at really, really cold temperatures.

      As for little things that make me personally unique – I write popular science articles for various magazines, I love playing guitar and I’m roughly 90,000 words into writing a sci-fi novel about time travel!

      As the others have said – everyone’s unique in their own ways, but the common traits among scientists tends to be an insatiable curiosity and thirst for learning, combined with a stubborn refusal to give up when the going gets tough!

    • Photo: Sarah Beasley

      Sarah Beasley answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I think I’m different because my job isn’t to do research, and I don’t work in a lab. I either work in an office writing reports or I work outside doing testing on aircraft. The stuff I do has a direct impact on the aircraft we fly on, but I also have less potential to make a big discovery because I don’t have as much time to read and learn about stuff. If I do discover something, it’ll probably be by accident!

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