• Question: Does science help you in life? Apart from your job

    Asked by Marcel to Tom, Paul, Natasha, Ildiko, Ester, Eoin on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ester Gil Vazquez

      Ester Gil Vazquez answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Being a scientist is not only a job, but also a lifestyle. You can’t switch it off. It means seeing life in logical therms, because you want to understand things (it can be really annoying for non-scientists). It also means asking lots of questions. All the time. About everything. This has cool applications in real life: being logical helps solving problems and asking lots of things allows you to learn lots of interesting facts. Why don’t you try it? be a scientists! 🙂

    • Photo: Natasha Myhill

      Natasha Myhill answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Science helps me to understand the world around me, what is going on with my own body (like during sleep, eating, exercise) and it helps shape me as a person. I have always been fairly curious, but being a scientist, it is my job to ask questions and think about how to answer them. This is really good for developing problem solving skills, time management (we often run several experiments at once), organisation (see previous point) and also teamwork! If you can’t work as a team in science, you wont get very far.

    • Photo: Paul McKeegan

      Paul McKeegan answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Having a logical, scientific way of thinking things through helps in lots of ways too. It makes it easier to see through the nonsense of advertising (activated oxygen bubbles in shampoo??? Anti-ageing cream??? Anti-oxidants in soft drinks???). Understanding how vaccination works would help a lot too, we still have a high incidence of Measles, Mumps and Rubella due to the 1998 MMR jab controversy. I think we’ve mostly got past it in the UK, but the USA is a different story.

    • Photo: Ildiko Somorjai

      Ildiko Somorjai answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I definitely agree with the others. It makes you see things in different ways sometimes-from animals around you, to whether or not you believe what a politician tells you or how much you believe crime programmes on TV. I think as a scientist it probably seems quite normal to analyse things around you, or to question them, or to want “hard evidence¨ all the time-this can often help you take decisions. So I think it ´s a good thing (but not everyone would agree!)

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