• Question: Can you work with the time that you have or does it get really stressful?

    Asked by sipho to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 18 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      There are busy times and less busy times.

      Sometimes if we want to get our measurement out in time for a big conference everyone has to strap themselves in and work a few extra hours. But at other times we can make up for it…

    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      I find it is pretty much always busy because i have so many different projects. I find i seem to get pulled into everything and then you have to be very careful with your time, but mostly it is exciting and fun which means it is ok. The only time i find it gets really stressful is when you have an experiment that is not working, everyone is working very hard and still things don’t go your way… then people can get cranky.

      The rest of the time it’s just fun! 😀

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Last year I felt I was in pretty good control over the amount of time I would spend working – I was not supervising anyone and if I wanted to do something I did, and if I didn’t I didn’t! This year is different however, if someone wants to do something then sometimes I have to be there, even if it is 10pm! That being said, I get to leave whenever I want on most days, and my social life certainly doesn’t suffer for being a scientist. Like Dan says, if we are going to a conference, writing a paper or a thesis then things get a bit hectic/stressful!

    • Photo: Natalia Parzyk

      Natalia Parzyk answered on 18 Nov 2011:

      normally it’s quite flexible in my case and it’s up to me when I’m doing most of my projects (few different things at same time). But as Daniel and Andrew said if you got conference coming or paper to write or sth which has a deadline (e.g. report) it might get stressful, especially when there is few hours left and I still haven’t finished.. but to be honest, it’s mostly due to late start 😉 Also there is limited time when I have a chance to work on big facilities like with neutrons or muons (kind of particles) at ISIS or ILL, when going there I’ve got limited amount of time (few days usually) for doing all the experiments, but it’s all about good time management;)

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 18 Nov 2011:

      For the most part the time is fine and it is possible to get the work done.

      However, like the others have already said, when you need results for papers and the deadline is approaching and experiments aren’t going well or there are bugs in your analysis code it’s really frustrating.

      When we work on the accelerator we split into shifts to help do the operational work, this is really fun – howe
      ver if there’s a major problem on a shift (ie something breaks / we can’t control the beam properly / things generally are not going well) and it’s approaching the beginning of a proper run of user experiments then things can get heated – but that’s all part of it, some peole work best under pressure, some don’t and since we’re quite a small team everyone is pretty understanding and everyone just tries there best. And if things break during a user experiemtn run then there’s obviously a lot more pressure to restore the beam (people are oncall 24/7 to come in and fix things) and again, if things don’t go your way it’s massively frustrating.

      But no, for the most part I find there’s good time to do the work and from my experience people would rather you do a quality job, even if it takes a tad longer 🙂

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