Question: Don't you ever get bored of your job?

Andy Norton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Sometimes! I think that, whatever you do in life, whether at school, at work, in a youth group etc., if you end up doing the same things over and over again, you’ll become bored. One of the really great things about science (not just what I do, or what everyone else in this group does, but science in all sorts of areas) is that you can do a whole load of different experiments related to the same thing, so each day/week/month can be really different. For example, if I take this week coming as an example, today I am preparing samples for compression tests, tomorrow I am on the microscope for the morning, and then I’ll look at my images in the afternoon, Wednesday I am smashing my ceramics, Thursday I am doing some teaching, and Friday I am on the Focussed Ion Beam making tiny little samples to do tests on. So it is pretty varied! For most science research, you do have to do a lot of different experiments (you can’t always trust the results from one sort of experiment, so you try various different things to make the project well rounded), and that makes everything much less boring.