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Asked by al95 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 12 Nov 2013.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 12 Nov 2013:
Hi al95, my lifestyle is pretty good. The hours in the lab can be quite long (I leave my house at 8:55am and get home at 6:45pm) and there is quite a lot of paper work at times, especially when you’re writing papers, but it’s definitely worth it because it’s a real privilege to get to do this job.
There is quite a bit of foreign travel, mainly for attending conferences (over the last 6 years I’ve been to Toronto, Copenhagen, San Diego, New York and Vienna and I’m off to Genoa and Cape Town(!) next year). People also spend time working abroad and a lot of scientists from the UK spend a couple of years working in places like the USA.
The salary is pretty good, you get paid to do a PhD (I got about £10k a year tax-free) and when you are a postdoc the starting salary is around £28k, although this depends on where you work.
All the perks are nice, and it’s definitely exciting to travel, but for the best thing about being a scientist is getting paid to think about things and making discoveries.
I hope that answers your question!
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David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:
I enjoy my lifestyle. I get paid about 13000 each year, which is not too bad – I bought a car last year and went on holiday to America this last summer, but that has left me a bit broke at the moment :/
Matt seems to be luckier than me with travelling abroad for conferences (or maybe he works harder!). I’ve only been as far as Edinburgh for a conference, but that was still fun. I expect I will go further away for another conference in the next year.
Matt’s also right that it’s nice to be paid to think about things that you find interesting, even if it seems like a lot of hard work sometimes. I think probably any job can be stressful and seem hard sometimes, but I think I enjoy this more than I would enjoy most others and I like the people I work with which is really important.
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