• Question: How hard to you work, so that you can win the prize money? (roughly how many hours per day, what you do, etc)

    Asked by nsam to Darren, Deuan, Duncan, Lori-An, Michelle on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Lori-An Etherington

      Lori-An Etherington answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      It depends on what needs to get done during the day. I usually arrive in work about 9am and I leave between 5 – 5:30pm (I usually can’t work much later than this as I have a 5 year old daughter whom I need to pick up). I spend most mornings preparing my experiments (making solutions and getting my rig ready – this is the area that I perform my experiments). During this time I might do a literature search to see if there are any new journals relating to my area of research. I have a coffee break around 10:30 and lunch around 12pm, although I often just have these breaks whilst sitting at my computer in the office. The majority of afternoons are spent experimenting and sometimes I attend seminars or prepare presentations. Occasionally I take journals home to read but usually I do all of my work whilst I am in the laboratory.

    • Photo: Darren Nesbeth

      Darren Nesbeth answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      It varies. But if you average it out over the year it’s maybe 40-50 hours a week in the lab and the office.
      The good thing about finding a job that you love is that you can be thinking about it in your free time and it doesn’t feel like work.

    • Photo: Deuan Jones

      Deuan Jones answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Like many labs in universities and in industry, we have fairly flexible working hours. I usually start work at 10:30 unless I need to be in earlier for a meeting or to start a really long experiment. I work till at least 7 usually and come in for a 2-3 hrs on a saturday. So that comes to about 40 hrs a week, but it can vary a lot – It’s not that unusual for us to work 50hrs a week.

      When I was doing a PhD (which you need for the job I do) we usually worked 60 hrs per week and sometimes more.

      Although it can be a lot of hours the flexibility is good – if I want I can usually go and meet a friend for coffee in an afternoon (just have to finish my work later), I can take my holidays pretty much any time I want and no-one is actually keeping a record of our hours – my boss like most professors is really interested in how many good experiments I can do and how much good quality data I can produce. So unlike many jobs, it’s one where you can actually do less hours if you’re really efficient and design experiments really well. I’m probably middle-of-the-road, I know people who aren’t as efficient and get less work than me done in a typical day and I know people who are much more efficient than me and so who get much more work done.

      Although there can be long hours, I like the fact that there’s lots of variety in my work – there’s office work looking at data and computer predictions or writing up (which I hate) and lots of reading so I can understand a new protein I work on for example. But then there’s also all the practical work at the lab bench and that also is very varied – sometimes I’m growing bacteria, sometimes parasites, other times I work on DNA or proteins. Basically I think variety is good – I don’t think I could do a job where I’m just at a desk the whole time.

      I really need to write shorter answers….

    • Photo: Michelle Hudson-Shore

      Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Well I generally work about 8 hours a day and spend around 2 hours a day actually getting to and from work. But because I’m also studying for a PhD part time I also have to work on that at home at the weekends sometimes.
      If I’m organising a Training School, submitting evidence to a government committee or working on something with a tight deadline then I do much longer days. I never seem to have enough time to do everything that I would like to do, but I think that might be true in a lot of jobs.

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