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The good thing about being a scientist, or one of the good things, is that there is that a day is quite hard to predict. Typical days don’t happen that often! Sometimes I have a lot of teaching to do, which is good fun as the students always bring something different to the work. But I can go for months without teaching at all. These times I’m I like to be in battle mode against a difficult experiment, trying my upmost to get some delicate result which relies on many factors working perfectly. Getting there takes a lot of time and effort. Whether it’s worth that effort is a question I debate with myself, and sometimes it’s not. An experiment maybe just doesn’t work – you were wrong about it, and you’ve spend months and  found out you’re an idiot! Being able to fail makes a good scientist – it gives you an open mind, filled with doubt, but some solid foundations with which to work. Luckily, a PhD is three and a half years and I’ve managed to get a lot of things wrong.

Sometimes, some glorious times, things do go right! In which case, publishing your results is the reward – but this is also time consuming. It can take months of tedious edits to write 6 pages describing your work. Coffee helps.

Having lunch is also an important ritual for me as it’s a time I get to share with other researchers and find out what they are up to. Researchers tend to be interesting people – today we talked about Numbers Stations, which are creepy shortwave radio stations used to send coded messages to spies.