Do you only work in a lab if you are a scientist ?

The first thing to understand is how general the word "scientist" is. Science covers a wide range of disciplines, some actually involved in the arts and athletics among other things. One of the things a scientist does is research in the sense of investigating what other smart people have found out about the problem to be solved. A scientist wants to avoid searching for answers that someone else has already determined. So a lot of what a lot of scientists do is actually read and listen and study the problem before doing any actual experiments or building anything.

When I started out at Bell Labs, we were building a large switching system with a team that involved hundreds of thousands of people. I spent the first year or so just learning about what others had already done. After that, only a small part of my daily activity actually took place in a lab where all the equipment was. And even then, I spent a large portion of my day evaluating what I'd found out and correcting any problems.

Realize that most of the people there could be considered scientists, but many of them were involved in analyzing the project, what went right, what went wrong, planning how to make progress and other things.

Later on, when I had invented things, I traveled around the country giving presentations about those things and explaining the ideas to other people.

One of the things I found the most fun was building things for my experiments and projects, and I often did that throughout the day, and sometimes night, at home in my office and workshop.

So no -- the activities of a scientist are not limited to working in a lab. They vary quite a bit, and you'll be happy to know that your experience and your preferences for what you like to do will have a great effect on how you spend your day. You can't really beat that deal!