• Question: what skills and qualifications do your occupations require ?

    Asked by ailhep123 to Tim, Simon, Rachael, Damien, Suzi on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by elliesmith, sk8r.
    • Photo: Simon Bennett

      Simon Bennett answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hello,

      I needed a degree in life science to do my PhD and some relevant experience.

      Thanks.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I’m an example of someone who is a scientist but doesn’t really work on things they learnt in science lessons! I’ve never even actually had a biology lesson – not one. I’m a language scientist, so the most important school lessons for me in the kind of science I do were French, English and Maths (because I use a lot of maths to try and prove whether the things I find out are significant discoveries or not – that’s called statistics).

      I reckon that at this stage, the most important thing you need to worry about is doing what you are interested in. The time when you might worry about what qualifications you need for a certain career will come later! The kind of science I do is called linguistics, but I didn’t find out that I wanted to be a language scientist as my career until I was already at University. I had gone to University just to study French and Latin, not linguistics – but luckily I had also studied the maths I needed when I was at school, only because it was compulsory …

    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi @ailhep123 and @elliesmith
      The PhD that I’m doing at the moment required me to have a degree in ‘a relevant subject’ (that’s how they put it on the application form), and preferably a Masters degree too.
      Relevant subjects to epidemiology could be a number of things, in my case it was Psychology, but my colleagues have degrees in biology, or life sciences, human biology, even economics. It all depends on the question they want to answer.

      Skills wise you need a good grasp of maths, although understanding the concepts is more important than being able to do the equations, as we use computer programmes to run the statistics, but we need to decide which statistics to use.

      Hope this helps, let me know if you’d like more info!

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