• Question: how did you know subject of science to go into?

    Asked by anon-186213 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      During my GCSEs I found biology was my best science and also the one I enjoyed the most. I took biology at A-level and found a similar thing, I was really interested in how things worked and how we can use that understanding for the benefit of humanity. It was during university where I studied biological sciences that I found I was really interested in molecular biology, microbiology and biotechnology. The content was fascinating, they were some of my strongest topics and the career prospects are good.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      The best advice I could give you is to do the scientific subject you enjoy the most. I enjoyed maths the most at school, so did this at university. After this, I did a masters called ‘mathematics for real-world systems’ which taught me about how maths can be used to model different aspects of the world, from biology to physics to economics. It was after this I ended up working in infectious diseases! So I ended up in a biological discipline, despite not doing this at uni. So do what you enjoy, and you will always end up somewhere interesting.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      Do what you love! Sometimes people at school will try to say that you shouldn’t do biology, and you should do physics or medicine because they think that the job prospects are better, but you have to study it for at least three years (hopefully more!) so you have to find it interesting!
      I was driven by the questions I wanted to ask – I was keen to work on outbreaks of diseases that there isn’t a lot of research or money into already. For example, I didn’t want to work on flu because so many people already work on it. I wanted to put my energy into neglected diseases, like Ebola, or Dengue fever, or Nipah virus. I feel very strongly about trying to increase equality in healthcare between countries, and this is my way of doing it!

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