What is the day-to-day of being a scientific researcher?

Being a researcher is quite exciting. The daily life depends mostly on your designation and the nature of the place you work for. Initially when you start your career you will be more involved with experiments. But as you go up time you will have to concentrate more on writing project proposals, guiding the students you get, attending various higher meetings establishing collaborations and so on. Now a days research has become atleast for some platforms a business as well. So along with research you also might need to do some number crunching. But you will find it exciting to do both the job of a 'manager' and scientist! Good luck.

Hi Claire,

Science is a field that comes with it's fair share of number crunching. However, I'd venture to say that it's only about 10-15% of your work day to day (in Bio and Chem). When making solutions/buffers it helps to know your basic scientific math. Knowing how concentrations will different throughout an experiment is useful.

Setting up an experiment comes with preparation and a bit of crunching but running it usually means you've figured out your numbers and are just going through the motions of adding what is needed to test your hypothesis.

Hope this helps!