• Question: do you always have something enjoyable in your jobs to occupy you and do each of your jobs include more social/team work or more work that you work on by yourself?

    Asked by CarmenP to Sarah, Sam, Paul, Matt, Eduard, Chris on 20 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Chris Tognini

      Chris Tognini answered on 20 Nov 2020:

      Great questions! I find that there is always something enjoyable to do in my job – and I think that’s a key to what keeps me motivated and interested in the work I do. It could be something like working by myself and being able to focus on writing code (for example, to automate testing that helps verify that our software does what it’s supposed to!). This can be a really satisfying task. Or it’s always exciting to work with the security team, say, to understand a new type of security exploit that hackers could be using, and how we can design and test a new feature to protect against it. So a good mix of individual and team work, which I find works really well together.

    • Photo: Sarah Brown

      Sarah Brown answered on 25 Nov 2020:

      I am definitely always occupied.I think it is fair to say that not every part of a job is always going to be enjoyable, however, I try to break up the bits I don’t like as much with the things I enjoy the most! Being a PhD student, I manage my own time (don’t have to work the usual 9-5 for example) and so this gives me flexibility to make my own schedule. A lot of PhD work in maths is usually done mostly by yourself with guidance from supervisors – though there are people around you to discuss things with that may be working on similar topics. I have also collaborated with academics from different universities and departments and this is always a nice team feeling.

Comments

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    I have the honour of being part of the Virtual Forum for Knowledge Exchange in Mathematics (V-KEMS) which is a national team of mathematicians who work together virtually to help to solve problems related to COVID-19. As well as being great fun to work in such a good team, this is also insanely effective. Mathematicians are wonderful problem solvers (it kind of comes with the job). It is really good that a positive effect of lockdown is the way that we are all working together.

  • Photo: Freya

    Freya commented on :

    Science is definitely a collaborative field, and that is fantastic. Currently I am doing a PhD so most of that is large body of my own work, however I can still go to my colleagues for help and we work together as a team in fieldwork. There are definitely sometimes where I am not enjoying the work I am currently doing so procrastinate by doing another bit of work, but at the end of the day, its all got to be done and overall I love my work.

  • Photo: Alan

    Alan commented on :

    Yes! The reason that I am in this career is because of the enjoyment that I get out of it! I work closely with my colleagues to deliver a great (hopefully) teaching experience for the budding mathematicians, physicists, and engineers which I am responsible for.

  • Photo: Christos

    Christos commented on :

    I always try to be involved in various tasks creating dashboards and writing small programs in Python. My job involves both working independently but also in teams depending on the project and I really like the mixture that it offers.