• Question: so to get where you are now, how much research did you have to do?

    Asked by addis to Sarah, Murray, Diana, Caspar, Alan on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Alan Winfield

      Alan Winfield answered on 11 Mar 2011:

      Hmm good question. Quite alot now I think about it – but I don’t think I got to where I am now just by doing lots of research. For one thing I spent nearly 10 years not doing any research at all, but starting up and then growing a small company (which, I’m happy to say is now a medium sized company). So, yes I did about 5 years research when I was studying for my PhD, then none at all for some years, and didn’t start doing research again properly until about 1993. And even since then – at UWE – there were times when I was doing more teaching and other stuff than research.

      But I love research and where I am now means that, for various reasons, I’m doing more research – and having more fun doing it – than at any time in my career. But how I got here is not just because I’ve done quite alot of research along the way – somehow all my experience of doing engineering in industry, and teaching, and managing junior engineers, and learning how to write grant applications, and probably lots of other things – including good luck and some very good advice and support from others – has led me to where I am now.

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      To get to where I am now, I went to Uni and did a 5 year Masters degree in Medicinal Chemistry. I started when I was 18 and graduated at 23. I had a lot of fun studying and I liked uni life. When you study Chemistry you have a nice mix of lectures and practical sessions in the lab. I was always better at lab work than studying!

      After the masters, I applied to do a PhD in Cancer Research. It’s pretty much like having a job and there’s no studying, it’s all practical work. You do your research for 3 years and then you spend about 3 months writing it up as like a massive report, which is called a thesis. Some people’s thesises are 200 pages long!

      I’m about halfway through my research (1.5 years). I’m 25 now and when I graduate with my PhD I will be 27!

      I’ve had a lot of good results this year and I’ve been working really hard. My research is going really well and I’m hoping to publish some of my work which will be really cool!!

    • Photo: Caspar Addyman

      Caspar Addyman answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      It took me 5 years to get here with the help of two professors, two laptop computers, two hundred babies and about 200 more primary school children and university students.

      The first professor was my PhD supervisor who helped me decide what to research and how to research it. He helped me pick a question in Baby science that had not been looked at before and helped me design some experiments to investigate it. He also bought my laptop computer so that I could do all the statistical calculations on our data and write the computer games that I took into primary schools.

      The 200 babies took part in 9 different experiments (just one or two each!) The children and students took part in four more. They all had to look at things on a computer screen and decide what they thought of them. It took me three years to do all of that I then wrote up a 300 page report on all my experiments and had an oral exam where two other scientists asked me questions and then I had a PhD. Which meant I could call myself Dr. Caspar.

      Then after I finished my PhD, I went to work with a different professor in France. I worked with him for 18 months. Here we only did a few experiments and spent a lot more time reading other people’s research and writing computer simulations. We were trying to decide on a new direction to go in for research so we had to see what else had been done before. We thought we had a good idea about investigating how babies gain a sense of time. So we wrote a long proposal to a government agency explaining the idea and explaining why they should give us money to do it. Lots of other researchers also sent in their ideas, but luckily our idea was one of the few that got chosen. The government decided we could have some money so that we can spend the next three years investigating this question.

    • Photo: Murray Collins

      Murray Collins answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Hi -I had to do original research – dissertations – for my undergraduate and masters degrees. Then I did some research for National Geographic sticking cameras up in the jungle in Indonesia, and I also did 6 months research in Gabon working out how much carbon there is locked up in the forest there. These pieces of research helped me get the funding I have for my PhD I think. I have had to do a lot of structured learning through courses as well!

    • Photo: Diana Drennan

      Diana Drennan answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      well, I started doing research in my senior year of my B.S. Then, I continued the project during my M.S. & Ph.D., which took me another 7 years. It would have taken less time, but I had two small children and wanted to spend lots of time with them, so I took my time. Most of my friends spent loooooonng hours in the lab pretty much 7 days a week. I treated my research more like a 9-5 job. I was lucky that I had a great research adviser who was ok with my schedule ! Then, I did a 2 year post-doc (which is a university code-word for “lots of work for very little money”). After that I came straight to the job I have now, and have been with the company for almost 8 years. It’s a long road, so you have to really love what you’re doing. For me, it was worth it. =)

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