• Question: whats your favourite and least favourite thing about your job?

    Asked by anon-213653 to Robert, Imad, Hannah, Fern, Christian, carolwallace on 12 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Carol Wallace

      Carol Wallace answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      I love the buzz of things going right/working – getting the results expected.
      I hate tidying up after other people! I’m not their slave/mum!

    • Photo: Fern Johnson

      Fern Johnson answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      My favourite parts getting to learn new things every day and getting involved with projects that can help improve the genetic testing services. It’s really satisfying when a program you write or a new type of analysis you carry out works. I’m also really lucky to be able to do master’s degree as part of my work and have a day from work a week to catch up on my assignments or work on my portfolio, not many job wouldn’t you do that.
      My least favourite parts is sometimes feeling like I have no idea what’s going on – being surrounded by experts when you’re only just starting out can be hard. I also feel guilty asking more senior scientists for help or for their time, because they’re very busy and have a lot of responsibility. But training others is part of being a scientist, and once I’m qualified I’ll take on work of my own and reduce the burden on the team.

    • Photo: Robert Ives

      Robert Ives answered on 13 Jun 2019:

      I really enjoy working with young and future scientists. I mentor (advise) some apprentices at work and also work closely with University students spending time at GSK. It’s great to see them developing and helping (in some small way) to steer them down a road that will hopefully lead them to become great scientists and be happy in their lives.

      Apart from medicines not working or animals getting sick, the worst part of my job is all the meetings I have to attend. Quite often, we find ourselves spending hours in meetings which don’t actually achieve very much. This can be really frustrating as we could have been doing something much more useful. Unfortunately, most work places are the same.

    • Photo: Christian Gude

      Christian Gude answered on 13 Jun 2019:

      In terms of the best: I love the moment when my experiments work out after months and months of time went into perfecting them. I also like the moment when your heart starts racing after you had a really good idea and you can’t wait to see if it works.

      In terms of the worst…this is a frequent question in live chats and I am with Rob here: Meetings are the worst. By far.

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