• Question: what inspired you to follow this career path?

    Asked by anon-325799 on 7 Jun 2022. This question was also asked by anon-321653, anon-331300.
    • Photo: Tammy Piper

      Tammy Piper answered on 7 Jun 2022:

      I didn’t set out to choose this career path. Originally I wanted to be an archaeologist (after watching Indiana Jones) and then I discovered marine biology as a teenager so studied that at uni. After graduation I ended up working in a pathology lab. I trained up as a biomedical scientist in a hospital lab and then switched to university research.

      The best advice I ever received is from my uni room mate. She is a computational scientist and is one of the smartest people I know. I asked her how she decided to do what she does and she replied that she didn’t. She just took advantage of opportunities that came her way and saw where they went.

    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 10 Jun 2022:

      I enjoyed studying medicine, but the research project I did as part of my intercalated BSc got me interested in cancer research.
      At the time, I was near the end of my time at medical school and I knew there were junior doctor jobs that allowed you to do more research (it’s called the Academic Foundation Programme) – so I applied for one of these jobs so I could carry on learning how to do research as well as working as a junior doctor.

      Working as a doctor, there is so much to know and do to try and make patients better. I think I was inspired to continue in research because sometimes we didn’t know more, and there was nothing more we could do to help the patient in front of us. I would think about the questions we could ask in the lab, and how perhaps one day find better treatments. That was what inspired me to continue combining medicine and science.

    • Photo: Emer Curley

      Emer Curley answered on 15 Jun 2022:

      To be honest it wasn’t what I’d planned! I originally did a degree in English Literature but when I graduated I found that a lot of the career options didn’t suit me; I wanted to do something that could help people, and while there are roles like that that an English graduate can do they usually require a lot of talking to people, which isn’t something I’m great at.

      I was researching roles where I could make a difference without having to be ‘out there’ all the time and came across medical physics, specifically using radiation to treat cancer, and found it was a good balance of helping while staying true to my introverted self. I retrained in medical physics and got so interested in parts of it that I ended up starting a PhD (which is a research degree running your own big project to figure out the answer to a question nobody else has solved, which is what I’m working on now).

    • Photo: Chelsea Gerada

      Chelsea Gerada answered on 16 Jun 2022:

      From a young age I always loved learning about the human body worked. This is what lead me to study medical science at university where I developed a passion for immunology because I thought it was amazing that we have this comprehensive army inside us trying to keep us healthy. I also found it interesting how pathogens could evade this army to cause disease. I ended up switching from virus research to cancer research because I found it so fascinating how complicated cancer was and the fact that it starts from our own cells so I wanted to study how our immune response dealt with this scenario.

Comments

  • Photo: Karin

    Karin commented on :

    I just wanted to agree with Tammy’s room mate 🙂 great advice! When you are making career decisions, in reality it’s really hard to know what you will enjoy in 10, 20 years time. So I think just be really honest about what you enjoy, and then keep looking for opportunities with that in mind. Sometimes you’ll get it wrong but you’ll still have gained something from it.
    I once thought I wanted to be a surgeon – my intercalated science degree was focussed on Surgery and Anaesthesia! But during my BSc research project, I worked in a lab where I did breast cancer research. My project meant I had to take blood samples from patients attending clinic. I realised that I was more interested in talking to patients and what drug treatments might help rather than having an asleep patient on whom to operate – and that honestly was the start of my oncology career. But I couldn’t have known that before doing it, and I learned a lot by doing that BSc that is relevant to what I do now. Now, the bit of my doctoring job I enjoy the most is the patient interaction, because it’s honestly like a science in itself – constantly learning, constantly adapting.