• Question: Do you ever get bored of studying a repeated subject

    Asked by Leah12murphy to Gavin, Karen, Mark, Michel, Roisin on 14 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by Questionsaboutscience123.
    • Photo: Michel Destrade

      Michel Destrade answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      Do you mean when you repeat a year? Happened to me in second year university. I actually didn’t mind, because I understood much better the second time around! It was like new material, but much easier to learn

    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      I’ve been working in astrophysics (particularly, on cataclysmic variables) for the last 3 years – and I’m not bored of them yet! There’s so much to learn about them, and every time I get new data on one, I learn something new and exciting.

      But the nice thing about science is you don’t have to stay working on the one subject for your whole life. I know lots of people who studied physics in college, and then went to finance, or who did a PhD in physics and then moved to working in biology or chemistry. I’m even considering changing fields next year, and moving away from cataclysmic variables and into a field called “X-ray binaries” (it doesn’t sound very different, but trust me, it is 😉 ).

      If you get bored of a subject, it’s very easy to switch, because you learn a lot of really good skills as a scientist.

    • Photo: Karen

      Karen answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      Yes! I have a very short attention span so I get bored easily…I was always in trouble in school because of this ?The good thing about my job is that there is great diversity in the things I do so I’m rarely doing the same thing for long.

    • Photo: Roisin Jones

      Roisin Jones answered on 15 Nov 2016:


      Repetition can become very tedious! While there’s always more to learn in my field, and I’m never short of new ideas, there are certain techniques in chemistry that are very common, and that I use very often, and sometimes doing these can be quite boring. On the upside, because I do them so often, I’ve gotten much faster at them, so they don’t last as long, and I’m able to quickly move back to the interesting parts of research!

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