• Question: Why did you choose the career that you have today?

    Asked by anon-197623 to Sonal, Rosanna, Matthew, Marleen, Dan, Atreya on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-198078, anon-198104.
    • Photo: Matthew Selwood

      Matthew Selwood answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I fell into it really. My university course offered a placement year as part of the program. I applied to 17 companies over 8 months, and the first one to offer me a contract was the “Central Laser Facility”, inside a huge science park called the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (where Dan, my fellow scientist, works). Here, I found great enjoyment in my work, and picked up very niche skills in the use of high power lasers. I also met a vast array of travelling academics who used the facility for their own experimental research. I talked with a great many, showed them my work, and a few liked it enough to offer me positions!

    • Photo: Marleen Wilde

      Marleen Wilde answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      More or less by chance too, to start with I never wanted to do a doctoral degree after my science studies. I was thinking my master’s is enough to get me a job in an industrial lab or elsewhere. I did have a job working in clinical trials, but after I while I got bored and wanted to progress and every interesting job description I looked at , had PhD as requirement (rather annoying if the job doesn’t look that difficult to do). So I ended up going back to uni to start a PhD and hopefully finish it end of this year. Just to find out probably, that I don’t want to do the jobs anymore which got me here, but I am interested now in something completely different 🙂

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