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Asked by byrneg to Claire on 17 Jun 2013.
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Claire Lee answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Oh noooo, I’m really sorry to hear about your exam 🙁
Well… no, I guess not, really. When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, or an archaeologist. Then somewhere during middle school I wanted to be a lawyer (the horror!) and then a sports scientist. Finally towards the end of high school I decided that “astrophysicist” sounded cool, and signed up for physics at university. During varsity I toyed with the idea of going into computational mathematics for a while, but eventually ended up in high energy nuclear physics and then particle physics.
I think for most people you never really know what you will enjoy doing until you do it – and sometimes it surprises you (it did me!)
It will be difficult, and there will be times when you screw up – that’s part of life, and it’s a big part of science too. Actually, sometimes the best times, the times you learn the most are when you fail in interesting and unexpected ways.
But the only thing that will stop you from being a scientist is you yourself. Don’t let one horrific exam get you down. Just make sure you learn from the experience, and let it make you a better person. It may make things a bit more difficult, and you may have to ask for a retake or do some extra work or something (was this your last year of school?) but if you want to, you can find a way.
Science isn’t only about good grades. Sure, they help. But what is perhaps more important is how you apply yourself.
Good luck!!
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Comments
jellybeanfun commented on :
so how did u decide?
Claire commented on :
Ok, don’t laugh, but – I read a book, and there was an astrophysicist as one of the characters in the book. I was about 16 at the time. I read the book and thought to myself, “well, astrophysicist sounds like just about the coolest job title EVER! I’m going to become an astrophysicist”. And that was that.
I finished school (I was taking science anyway at school because I liked it) and went to uni and started a BSc degree, with physics, math, applied math, and chemistry.
In my 3rd year of physics we had to do 2 big projects – I did one on satellites, and the other on pulsars (a very astrophysics topic). And I didn’t really enjoy them. I found them kind of – boring, I guess. The pulsars just didn’t excite me very much.
In my last year we had to do one bigger project, and I ended up chatting to one of my lecturers who had a PhD student working on high energy nuclear physics (also at an accelerator called JLab in the USA – here they were smashing electrons onto protons). Anyway, he suggested I do some work on the same project, and I just really ended up enjoying it. So at the end of the year when the same lecturer asked me if I wanted to go to the USA to visit the lab for another experiment, I said yes!
My point is – there is still a lot of time for you to decide what you want to do. You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start university – the courses all start off very general. Just have some sort of idea where you want to go (science, medicine, humanities, etc) and start there. As you work through things you will learn what you enjoy doing, and what you don’t really enjoy. So try as many things as you can to find out what you really like.
I think the key to living a happy life is to find something that you really enjoy doing, something that you are passionate about, and then do that as your job. As long as you have passion you can’t really go wrong. So try stuff out, and don’t be surprised if you find your passion where you least expect it 🙂
(by the way – the book was “Sphere” by Michael Crichton, and they made a movie of it too. The movie had Samuel L Jackson and Sharon Stone in it, too. Winner!)