• Question: Do any of your friends or relatives share the same interests as you?

    Asked by to Nancy, Michael, Emma, Elaine, Andrew on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Andrew French

      Andrew French answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hi!

      I have a lot of friends who have roughly the same interests. My family do completely different things (and I’m not sure they understand what I do exactly!!) 🙂

      Andrew

    • Photo: Emma Reid

      Emma Reid answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Howdy!
      Most of my friends aren’t scientists or interested in science at all! Personally I think this is a good thing because it’s good to talk to friends and not have to chat about work stuff unless I want to. Sometimes after a long day in the lab the last thing I want to think about is science! My uncle is a scientist, although he works in industry rather than in a university like me. It’s good to have someone close who can give me an opinion on career related stuff since he’s been there and done it all before!

    • Photo: Michael Kelly

      Michael Kelly answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      My wife is an Optometrist so she has a good understanding about my work. I work a lot on mathematical models and its a very specialised (small) area of work. So not many people are that interested. I was working on data that wasn’t very reliable, sometimes called `noisy’ data, I was trying to extract meaning from the noise and my colleagues banned be from mentioning the word noise. One of the good things about working at a large university is that there are lots of people doing unrelated work but using techniques that can be applied across disciplines.

    • Photo: Nancy Carlisle

      Nancy Carlisle answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      My parents were both teachers- my mom was a maths teacher and my dad was an English teacher. So I guess they were both interested in learning. A lot of the friends that I have made as an adult are also scientists and researchers- mainly because that is who I meet. That means that when I got out with my friends, we often start talking about interesting research!

    • Photo: Elaine Gardener

      Elaine Gardener answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      My family find my work interesting but I’m not sure they all totally understand it all 🙂

      I’m actually glad I don’t have a job like for example, a computer programming where family and friends rely on you outside of work to fix their computers when they go wrong!!

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