Question: Do you travel around a lot to work with other scientists as part of your job?
Asked by kianared13 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 18 Jun 2011.
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Comments
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kianared13
commented on 21 Jun 2011: @suzi Well, I definitely want to go to university, I might take a gap year to go travelling but I’m not sure. I want to work with medicine and the human body is the same everywhere in the world so I may travel around as part of that. Thanks for answering my question!
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Damien
commented on 21 Jun 2011: That travel-plan sounds a great idea. I know another scientist who did her PhD in microbiology (I think) – her thesis was on some disease (afraid I can’t remember which!) which affects white people quite badly and certain black people hardly at all. The people who were particularly unaffected by it were Ethiopians, so she did some of her work with those people, in Ethiopia, testing them and their blood to see what was different about them that made this disease affect them less.
I’m sorry that’s really vague, but you get the point! Travelling around the world can often be a real help to research, especially medical research, because the human body is almost but not quite exactly the same everywhere – and it’s the little differences that are interesting to study!
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kianared13
commented on 21 Jun 2011:
@damien Thanks for answering my question Damien! Can you speak french?
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Damien
commented on 21 Jun 2011:
Yes, I do speak French. In linguistic science, funnily enough, you often don’t have to speak a language very well to be able to study it – because the studying can often be done from written records – but, in the kind of thing I do, you do have to speak the language. The particular kind of linguistic science I do is called sociolinguistics, which means ‘what it says on the tin’: the relationship between language and society, or between language and the people who speak it. So, to really find out about that, you have to interview them, which is what I do, and of course that involves speaking the language.
The travelling is a great side-benefit!
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Hi @kianared13
I have travelled a bit to work with other scientists, and I think I will do so more in the future. There is a lady in Dublin who works on similar things to me, and at some point during my PhD I hope that this means I’ll get to go out there.
Also scientists often get to travel the world to go to conferences, and present their work to other scientists, and hear about their work. I’ve been to a few conferences, and have a couple this summer, and they’re great fun.
Would you like to travel a lot when you’re older?
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I’m the same as Suzi – I travel quite a lot to conferences, to talk to other scientists. It’s not so much working with them, as just giving them a short talk about your work, and they give you one about theirs, and then you can discuss what you are doing, and get suggestions from each other. Sometimes that’s very useful, as you can get so used to your own project that you don’t see the flaws in it – like when you have written some piece of coursework and read it so many times that you can’t see the bit where you’ve written and as nad any more! So I’ve just come back from a conference in France, and I am going to one in Canada in August, and hopefully the USA in November.
I’m lucky enough, as well, to travel to France a lot just to do the interviews to get the recordings that I analyse for my linguistic atlas! It’s a great way to combine work and play …
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