• Question: what made you want to be a scientist.

    Asked by doctorhouse to Hermine, Katy, Laura, Nathalie, Paula on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by borat, elliotpanda, gunnersrule, ronaldo.
    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hi there,

      There are a lot of things I’m not happy with (e.g., biodiversity loss, climate change), and I wanted to help fixing it (at the end, if you believe in something, you have to go for it, isn’t it?). I think that was an important motivation for being wanting to become a scientist. The second one is that I’m very curious – and always struggled with answers such as “it’s like that” or “we don’t know why”. When you are curious, you want to know why this or why that, and that’s what scientists try to answer every day 🙂

    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Greetings DoctorHouse

      As I’ve explained to one of your colleagues, I always liked science but I also liked many other things at school, so it took me a while to make a choice… At 16, I was convinced I wanted to be an architect. And then I lived in Guine-Bissau, in Africa, where I had a great biology teacher that taught us about genes and heredity – I got hooked!

      It still took me a while to make the final decision – acting was my great passion. Eventually I realised I would really like to study biochemistry and kept doing drama as an amateur actress. 😉

      I guess when I first heard about genes and genetics, I realised how fascinating is the natural world and the way it works and evolves. I got a hint that I would enjoy trying to find out how things work – and I do love it! 😉

    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I didn’t wake up one day and just think “hmmm, i think i’ll be a scientist”, i just kind of fell into it. I always enjoyed geography and being outside and enjoyed the other sciences too so I just took them at A Level and took it from there. When it came to choosing what to study at university, I was immediately taken by the idea of volcanoes, earthquakes and generally being outside so geology seemed like the obvious choice!

    • Photo: Laura Dixon

      Laura Dixon answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I always liked problem solving. Being a scientist is basically a job about problem solving! You have a question and you do research until you find an answer 🙂

    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Curiosity!

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