What can you describe about the typical work days at the job?

A typical day for myself as a research scientist would go something like this:

8-9 AM: I'll usually roll into the laboratory somewhere between these times. When you are a research scientist, no one will really be clocking your hours or anything, so it is important for you to self-motivate because there is always something to be done and it can be hard to see how to do it most efficiently. However, you will be well trained for this as pursuing the terminal degrees required for a job as a research scientist demands it!

9-10 AM: Set up my experiments. So, I'm writing my objectives for the day's experiments, listing out the materials that I will need (for example, I might need to make a chemical solution for the day to use for a particular experiment so it is very important that I record the ingredients for this in my notebook!). Sometimes, if you are running an experiment that is "new" to you, this could take until lunchtime!

10AM-12PM: Initiate experiments. As a scientist in biochemistry, this involves things like running and staining gels (which we use to monitor and understand biomolecules)and growing biomolecules in "expression systems" which are organisms that we have altered to grow the molecules we are interested in.

12PM-1PM: Lunch. This can also be a good time to meet with my project advisors and collaborators who supervise and advise the work that myself and others perform in the lab to make sure we all understand the experiments I am doing, why they are important and what questions they will be answering.

1PM-3PM: Monitor experiments and reading. A lot of what we do in lab is "hurry up and wait" which means that the experiments I set up usually take several hours (or even days or weeks!) to complete and all that hard prep work I did earlier in the day means I have to wait for my experiments to finish, so I usually will monitor the progress of these experiments and keep them going. Sometimes I will set up new experiments, and much more often I will spend my afternoons reading. When I say reading I don't mean something like Better Homes and Gardens, I mean peer-reviewed literature by other scientists in my field. This literature is the source of all scientific knowledge and contains useful new ideas I could try and apply to my own research. For example, someone may have a new method for looking at biomolecules that are similar to the one I am working on and I might want to try it on my own biomolecule. Or, maybe someone has tried an experiment on my biomolecule that I was thinking of trying, and they already have the answer and wrote about it in their article. So, I wouldn't have to necessarily try it (though I might anyways, because repeating others results is important) because the answer is known!

3PM-5PM: Finish experiments and write up conclusions. By now, hopefully, my experiments have finished. I will stop them, analyze their results and then I will do my most important job; I will write up my conclusions. I will use the experimental results (and the objectives I set out to accomplish that morning) to determine what is happening with my biomolecule and what these results mean for our work. Sometimes the answer will be positive (our biomolecule grows well under these conditions, yay!) and much more often it will be negative (it doesn't grow [:(]) but negative results are still good and incredibly important because they tell you a lot! It is hard for new researchers because in research science (if you are doing something hard, which you should be) you see a lot of failure and not a lot of success. But the successes really are awesome and are very worth it and what keeps science moving.

I hope this answers your question. Overall, a career in science is really fun! Your schedule is very flexible and you often have a lot of freedom to get a lot of other tasks done because your work is so condensed. Though, sometimes, it can be hard because cells and living things can't always be turned "off" over nighttime and the weekends so you might have to come in at weird hours for a bit to keep things running. That being said, our work is always getting easier with state of the art technology and my workload is constantly more efficient as the years go by. Have a good day!

Joe

Maryland, USA

Effeciently dividing my tasks based on their priority from answerwing urgent emails, processing requests from the highest amounts to the minor ones, handling on sales and customer  escalations knowing that i'm in the operationnel, but sometime it's create a bit of Monotony.