Any scientists here?

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If so do you like your choice of career?

i like it, but there are times when i wish i was a delivery guyor a postman.

anyway, it can lucrative if you end up being tenured. you do research, get patents, make startups, and teach just a couple of courses a year for a good salary.
and they can never ever let you go because you are tenured.
and you have your own army of personal slaves.

I currently work in IT, the bits of my current job I like best are learning new things and putting the knowledge into practise, developing better systems and troubleshooting complex issues.
Esp where there's no knowledge to lean on and I have to sit quiet and just investigate and nut something out and get to the bottom of it, because theres no alternative and no-one else that can do it. Its a challenge and fires me up and is what I enjoy. And that got me thinking.
I'd have to start from scratch at University, but I like learning so I'm mulling it over, I might start with a few papers and see if I hate it .

I'm an aspiring scientist, if that counts

Right now I'm working as a one-to-one teaching assistant at a school for children with special needs. I like it a lot, but I've reached my boredom threshold. Maybe others can relate to this: when you've been at a job long enough to figure out what's expected of you. Then you realize that no one's really interested in your ideas unless you have the same qualifications they have.

So rather than quitting after a year (like I've done in the past) I'm researching going back to school for communication sciences and disorders. Hopefully that could lead to a doctorate in neuroscience. I'd be a little old lady by the time I'm done

Go fot it, I doubt we will sit back when we're old and think 'damn I wish I hadn't done that science degree and had just done the same thing as before'

hm, a couple of things, science is extremely competitive and one needs to follow the timeline (have phd before 35 at least) so you can get into the jobs. also jobs that require phd are very scarce and distributed, i.e one needs to move across the country.
i would recommend masters to be taken more seriously.
nostromo, before committing go to the university and take a look, speak to people.

On my way to become a computer scientist with focus on computer games...

basically getting an education on how to program game engines, 2D and 3D

at the same time I suppleant this with some homeschooling in 3D modelling, engine scripting and some photoshop stuff.... and Japanese

and so far I LOVE it. i've always had the dream of making computer games... within a month I made a simple hangman game for use with the command-line prompt in Windows, and shortly thereafter I made a shoot-em-up and a simple RPG... Right now i'm getting started on a sort of educational RPG game.

the main thing is, I get to see the fruits of my labor growing every time I press the debug button

As a kid, I was pretty much into astronomy and medicine, almost to the point that I could describe half the objects in the asteroid belt, perform a triple bypass operation and conclude it's never Lupus...

Thats good advice thank you, I will do that.

I'm a scientist. I make predictions and verify them through experiments.

If I think some girl is a b***h, I call her one, and if she shows me one, then it has obviously been verified. That is science, plain and simple. It doesn't require electricity.

I'm studying science at the moment, I'm not too sure I'll actually be able to do the job though, I'm one of the better students but chances are I'll mess up the job somehow...

This is remarkably similar to my own current situation. O.o

I don't know if you would exactly call it a "scientist" but I had a job doing environmental testing for EPA permits and environmental lawsuits, and then I had another one doing DNA extractions in a medical lab. Then I got laid off, and now I'm a just a dishwasher. It sucks, once you get jobs like the ones I had, no one will you hire you because they think you'll be "too smart and uppity" to be a file clerk or whatever. I don't think I'm too good for anything; as long as the work is tolerable and it pays the bills, I don't give a ****.

I liked my lab jobs because they were repetitive and didn't involve a lot of social interaction outside of the three or four people I worked with. It was very structured and I knew what I had to do each day because I would come in and print a list generated by the computer of which samples to process and what time they had to be done, which eliminated the problems of executive dysfunction and such.

I worked in manufacturing once and I liked it for the same reason---repetitive work not involved with the public, and everyday there was a stack of papers at my work station saying which parts I had to weld and how many.

Physicist here. Love my career, got it out of one of my obsessions. Can't think of life without it.

I'm right now I'm studying to get a B.S. in biochemistry. Doing a math minor too, because I do not have a natural gift for it but I know it's a valuable tool to have command over.

I'd really love to teach (college level), but maybe that's just because the only exposure I've had to the sciences is through classes in school... I want to get a job tutoring this year, if I can. Just to see if teaching is my forte or not. People have told me that I am a great teacher.

I also have a job working in a lab, I started about a year ago and I'm really enjoying it so far. So, at this point, teaching/research is my plan. Impressionable? Who, me? Hahaha.

But, whatever the case turns out to be, right now I know I like learning science, so I'm gonna keep on keeping on for as long as possible. I'm currently planning on grad school for a Ph.D - already accepted into one program, actually - pending my graduation.


galwacco, what do you do exactly? What do you mean by "physicist"? I'm curious.

To be more exact, I'm taking my masters in astrophysics, I do research at the astrophysics lab for Santa Catarina State University ( Brazil ), finding and measuring accretion disks for binary stars. It's fun, though like you, I do not have a natural gift for this, so both math and physics came really hard to me, and still does once in a while.

Here's a link of the lab's website, in case you get interested, bummer it's not in English:

http://www.astro.ufsc.br/wordpress/?page_id=66

im a Transhumanist so im really interested in BioMedical Gerontology(the study of Life Extension by manipulating the aging process) im very interested in NOT dying any time soon or in tghe near or very far future and i honestly dont really care what it takes to achieve that goal, call me a coward if you will there are not many causes i find are worth my life since i dont believe in Life after Death. Dr. Aubrey De Grey is a BioMedical Gerontologist from Cambridge University he has made some VERY interesting discoveries about the Human Aging Process. i have been researching this field extensively for bout 2 years to know just what im getting myself in to