Question: What do you struggle with within your occupation?
Keywords: challenges, day2day, difficult
Comments
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Everyone struggles with something in their lives, whats life without some potholes. Thank you for answering my question, I enjoyed you answers and finding out what are some things that make you jobs difficult.
reggie13
One of the trickiest parts of my job is that there is no one “right” answer to the things I’m trying to figure out. A lot of classes in school are different, because you are graded on whether or not you get the answer that is already known. But if we don’t know the answer, we can’t check our work! On top of that, often there are so many different competing parts to any new technology (How much does it cost? How long will it take to build?) that we often aren’t trying to find even the *best* answer, but just one that is *good enough*.
I think this is one of science’s “dirty little secrets”, actually, since a lot of people don’t realise how many different parts of science work that way!
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@reggie13: That’s a really good question. For me, it’s often seeing animals living in poor welfare conditions and knowing they could have a better quality of life if information was more freely available. I hope to help in getting the information scientists know out of the academic science journals and to the people working through my work with the Australian Working Dog Alliance. I don’t think people do things to be mean, sometimes it’s just lack of knowing a better way to do things.
This can be frustrating when you see it over and over again. Dealing with people and staying nice and friendly while trying to get them to change the way they’ve been doing things for a long time can be a struggle!
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Computers are difficult beasts because they always do what you tell them, which is usually not quite what you meant. Actually, my younger daughter was like that – I always had to be careful what I asked her because she was very good at taking me literally and doing the exact opposite of what I wanted.
It is a challenge, but, like my younger daughter (grown up now) that is the fun of it.
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Juggling many different things and trying to prioritise them so the important things get done on time. I suppose time-management is a word which captures it – not that I do it poorly necessarily – there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything I’d like to do. Some things have to drop off the list.
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Hey @reggie13,
Good question. I struggle with a few things really. Most of it comes down to the fact that theres only 24 hours in a day! I have enough interests in my life for me to feel like I should be starting the next ‘thing’ whatever that may be.
In my research at the moment, the thing I struggle with the most is when an experiment fails, and no-one else (not even the library) has the answer I need, then a 10 foot wall is built in front of me. I have to figure out the best way to continue forward and if that means climbing it, going around it or knocking it down, then I have to come up with another plan.
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