• Question: do you always have something enjoyable in your jobs to occupy you and do each of your jobs include more social/team work or more work that you work on by yourself?

    Asked by CarmenP to Sarah, Sam, Paul, Matt, Eduard, Chris on 20 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Chris Tognini

      Chris Tognini answered on 20 Nov 2020:


      Great questions! I find that there is always something enjoyable to do in my job – and I think that’s a key to what keeps me motivated and interested in the work I do. It could be something like working by myself and being able to focus on writing code (for example, to automate testing that helps verify that our software does what it’s supposed to!). This can be a really satisfying task. Or it’s always exciting to work with the security team, say, to understand a new type of security exploit that hackers could be using, and how we can design and test a new feature to protect against it. So a good mix of individual and team work, which I find works really well together.

    • Photo: Sarah Brown

      Sarah Brown answered on 25 Nov 2020:


      I am definitely always occupied.I think it is fair to say that not every part of a job is always going to be enjoyable, however, I try to break up the bits I don’t like as much with the things I enjoy the most! Being a PhD student, I manage my own time (don’t have to work the usual 9-5 for example) and so this gives me flexibility to make my own schedule. A lot of PhD work in maths is usually done mostly by yourself with guidance from supervisors – though there are people around you to discuss things with that may be working on similar topics. I have also collaborated with academics from different universities and departments and this is always a nice team feeling.

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