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Asked by slamdunkeroo to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by bmurdie312.
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Sam Geen answered on 17 Jun 2013:
I really like travelling to new places and meeting people (well, OK, the travelling is really tiring but the new places and people are great). My research group went to Korea, and I’d never been to Asia before, so it was a great experience.
In terms of research, finishing my PhD defence was exhausting and exhilarating – two people asked me questions for 4 hours about my work, and then had to decide whether I’d passed (I did).
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Kate Husband answered on 17 Jun 2013:
We did some work based on observations (i.e. Looking at the sky) which got published at Easter and about 2 weeks later someone else published a bit of work based on theory and maths which totally agreed with what we did and proved we were right! Very satisfying to know!
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Getting my first paper published was a really special feeling. Other scientists need to read it and say whether it is good enough or not before it gets published, so it’s pretty daunting.
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Claire Lee answered on 18 Jun 2013:
I worked on a technique that was used in one of the Higgs search groups that helped them get some results to contribute to those that proved that we found the Higgs. Without the stuff I’d worked on, they wouldn’t have been able to get the results they did (the work would have been cancelled) so that was a really great feeling!
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Robert Woolfson answered on 19 Jun 2013:
Making a molecule no-one had ever made before. My lab had been looking for the molecule for years and I basically stumbled on it by accident. Really good feeling and it also taught me a lot about the nature of scientific discovery.
Comments
slamdunkeroo commented on :
what is getting your paper published?
Matt commented on :
Good question slamdunkeroo – it’s not something I knew about until I went to university. Getting a paper published is like if you write up a report and give it to your teacher. The teacher says “yes, yes, very interesting, but I need to make sure you are correct”, so they give it to other teachers or students to see if they can find anything wrong with your report. If they can’t, then they give it back to the teacher and say “yes, we agree that slamdunkeroo has found something interesting and that we can’t find anything wrong with how they found it out”. So, the teacher prints it out and anyone in the world can read it if they want to. When I give a paper to the editor of a scientific journal (like a science magazine read by other scientists so they know what the best science is), the editor sends it out to other scientists and they try to find something wrong with it. When I got my first paper published (I have a few papers published now) it was a great feeling because it showed I’d done a good job, and that people were interested in the work I had done.