• Question: When your work is stressful and may feel tedious, how do you keep motivated? And how do motivate yourself to aim higher in your specialist field?

    Asked by turnak1 to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 20 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Hi turnak1,

      Sometimes work is both stressful and tedious but that’s just one of those sad facts of life — it’s the same for all jobs, as far as I can tell. When it happens, there are a couple of things I try to do. I try to clear stressful things off my desk — that is, I try to finish them up quickly so they stop bugging me. If that isn’t working for some reason, I tend to switch to some other thing I need to do that is more interesting/rewarding. One of the good things about being a scientist is that you have loads of different things happening all the time so you can switch between jobs when one is getting you down.

      Things like IAS are a good example. This is really fun and there are always more Qs to answer, so when I want a break from some tedious job, I flip over here and have a play for a little bit. Much more enjoyable than responding to reviewer criticisms on a paper, for instance!

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Hi turnak1. I think I answered a very similar question from you about this the other day. Didn’t you manage to find it? Here’s what I wrote then:

      There are always boring chores that have to be done. I think the advantage of a research job is that I usually have several projects ‘on the go’ at once. So, if I am bored writing a paper for one study I can turn to the analysis for another, or do some work preparing the materials for the next experiment.

      There are definitely times when I worry about whether I am doing well / working hard enough, and it can be a bit depressing. The timescale along which things happen in science is much slower than in other jobs, and the big rewards (e.g. getting a paper accepted for publication) don’t come every week. I think it’s important to have good support and encouragement from other people at work and at home – I’m lucky to have both and usually I find that I’m pretty quickly feeling much more positive again!

      I think the only way to truly motivate myself is to aim higher and think about the next study, the next paper, the next job. It’s in the nature of our work to always want to know more, and that passion is the best motivation.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Good question! I work in cell & molecular biology and tend to find that I tend to have “discoveries” of some size or another every 3/6 months, and the time in between when experiments aren’t working or keep having to be “fine tuned” can be a bit demoralizing. I guess I try to remember why I’m doing it and how good the results will (hopefully!) be. I also try, if i’m getting stressed out by a project, to put it on hold and work on something different for a week or two before coming back to it (possibly other experiments, maybe trying to write part of a paper or similar). And then something like I’m a Scientist comes along from time to time, giving you the chance to do something utterly different with your time.

      In terms of aiming high in the field, I guess its a variety of reasons. Firstly science can be quite competitive, so you do worry that if you don’t keep the pace up then someone else may make your discovery before you. Also, particularly if there are a lot of “big name” scientists working in the field, then you kind of want to earn their respect (early on in your career this counts double as you might want a job with them in the future). But bascially, it normally comes down to wanting to make discoveries and then push ahead to the goal of your research (be that understanding how something works, developing new drugs or similar).

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Hello, very good question. When an experiment goes wrong I try to keep focused on what the actual question is that I’m trying to answer. I then try to trouble shoot to make sure that I’m doing the experiment correctly. I find it very motivating to talk to colleages and to my boss to discuss any problems, and to get some ideas from them. Also there’s always weekends and holidays to look forward to :). Once in a while it all becomes worth it when you have put together a nice set of experiments that make sense as a new discovery ready for publication! these are ocassions for celebration! In terms of motivation to aim higher, it is important to have this within you, not only because it’s nice to get out there to do good quality research but because research is an extremely competitive field, both to get funding to do the research and also to publish the research, so you are pushed to aim higher by funding bodies and by other researchers.

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