• Question: What is a typical 'day in your work life' like?

    Asked by laurenrushen to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Anouk Gouvras

      Anouk Gouvras answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      In the UK I go to my office and open the computer or I go to the lab to start working on collected parasite DNA, in Tanzania I go to a school or a lake to collect parasite DNA

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      I get into my lab, start looking at chromosomes and write reports. I’ll look at DNA probes (via a technique called FISH – see my profile) and talk with consultants. Days go very fast as I am always busy! Thanks for asking

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      Hmm….typical? Loosely controlled chaos!!

      If I’m growing cells, the first thing I have to do is check on them: if they need attention or are ready for an experiment I’ve planned, then I need to deal with them (or at least plan a slot later in the day to deal with them!).

      If we’re in term-time, I might need to give a lecture, or maybe run a practical class or a tutorial. My least favourite thing is lecturing at 9am because my brain always feels like cotton wool first thing! And I might have the occasional meeting about teaching policy and stuff like that.

      I often have students in the lab (PhD students all year round, undergraduate students in term time and, sometimes, in the summer as well so they can get extra lab experience), so I need to make sure that they know what they need to do and are not running into problems.

      If I’ve had some interesting results, I need to write them up as a paper to send to a journal and see if they are willing to publish them. That’s what I’m doing at the moment, but I keep having to going back to the lab to do an extra experiment (or two!) to make the paper better.

      I am also supposed to be writing grant proposals: if we want to do a particular set of experiments, we have to write down what we want to do, along with the results we already have to suggest that the new experiments are worth doing. We have to work out what this will cost (reagents, lab equipment, money to pay someone to do the experiments), and say what benefit it will have to society. Then we send it all off to a ‘funding agency’: often a charity or a government research council and cross our fingers that they will like what we’ve suggested and give us some money! Research money is quite difficult to get at the moment: it’s very competitive, so most of us seem to be getting ‘no’ back as an answer, rather than ‘yes’ at the moment. Next time, maybe…

      Oh, and with the rest of my time, I do experiments in the lab!

      But today (after making sure my student in the lab was OK and feeding my cells and chatting online with you lot), I went to a garden party to help all our new graduate students celebrate…had a glass or two of bubbly……probably why I’m so ‘talkative’!

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