• Question: What's do you like best about your job? :D

    Asked by justiekeeling7 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by melissalowe, elliesmith, nicoledawson, leeliebert, geordiecatcher, lucysmith, chuckgreene, qasim3233, themysteriousmugenpanther, carriew111.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Hi @juistiekeeling7, @melissalowe and @elliesmith
      Thanks for your question!
      I was just thinking this was easy to answer, but actually … 🙂
      I really love my job, there are loads of things I like about it.
      But probably the thing I like best is feeling that I’m doing something really worthwhile, that will help people. If it is true that cannabis can cause people to develop nasty illnesses like psychosis or depression, then if I can help to show this, we can educate people about it, and prevent people getting ill. If however the opposite is true, and people who are ill use cannabis because it HELPS them cope with their illness, then to stop them using it would be bad for them. So finding out the truth is really important here.

      Sorry this has turned in to a really long answer, I hope I’ve answered what you wanted to know 🙂

    • Photo: Rachael Ward

      Rachael Ward answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Wow, this is a hard question. I think the best thing for me is probably finding out something new, something that no one else has shown before but that helps us understand how the nervous system works.

      When I was doing my PhD, my lab and I were the first people to show that type of lipid called omega-3 fatty acids (you get them from eating fish and are often mentioned on the news / in the paper so you may have heard of them as “fish oils”) help to reduce the amount of damage done to the nervous system after spinal cord injury. This was very very exciting and the laboratory and many other people are still working on this and hoping to try giving it to people who have suffered from a spinal cord injury to reduce the paralysis and other effects of this type of injury.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      My job pays for me to go to France and record people speaking, and that’s like a holiday!

      In general, I’m always saying that I feel really lucky to be paid to do something that I would do for free anyway. (Working on languages and language science.) Of course I wouldn’t do it for as long if they weren’t paying me, but you know what I mean – I love working with languages, so sometimes it doesn’t even feel like work what I do …

      If you want to know specifically what I like about my language-science job, I’d say this. I do sociolinguistics, which is studying the relationship between languages and the people who speak them – so doing things like coming up with numbers to help us predict what sort of an accent someone is likely to have, based on where they’re from, how old they are, what their job (or their parents’ job) is, and whether they’re male or female. I work mostly on French (but on other languages sometimes too). A lot of work in my subject has been done about American English (and British English too), so we know a lot about what English accents different people have, but we don’t know a lot about that sort of thing for French. So I’m taking what we know about the sociolinguistics of English and seeing whether the same sort of thing is true about French. The great thing is that we know some things are true for English – like, if you’re from Manchester born and bred, you’ll probably have a Manchester accent, and the same for any other big town – so I’m taking things that are proven for English and seeing if they’re also true for French.

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @justiekeeling7, @melissalowe, @elliesmith, @nicoledawson

      The thing I ‘like’ best about my job is being able to wear whatever I like to work – I once read a t-shirt that said “success is never having to wear a suit to work” – I’ve tried to be successful ever since 🙂
      Although I ‘like’ wearing whatever I want to work, I ‘love’ everything else about my job. Most of all I love asking questions and trying to find answers to them.

Comments