• Question: How many hours would you work, in a normal week, in a laboratory?

    Asked by anon-252854 to Sophia on 4 May 2020.
    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 4 May 2020:

      In a normal week I don’t spend many hours working in a lab. Most of my normal day-to-day work is mostly using a computer to write code to run simulations or analyse data. I do teach in an nuclear physics lab for physics students though so I normally spend every Tuesday helping students to run experiments and marking their work.

      I will work in labs whenever I have an experiment to do. Because my work studies radioactive atoms that only last a few days before they decay, whenever we run an experiment to produce them it will be lots and lots of hours in a lab for a week or so while we collect as much data as we can before the atoms decay.

Comments

  • Photo: Kerrianne

    Kerrianne commented on :

    Varies wildly! Often depends on conference deadlines and how close I think I am to achieving something. Sometimes there can be late nights in the lab.

  • Photo: Greg

    Greg commented on :

    most days I work 9:30 to 18:30, but It’s quite inconsistent. Some days there will be an experiment that needs finishing before some else takes over the equipment. However the flipside of the irregular hours is that you can leave early and arrive later if you’re feeling a bit tired!

  • Photo: Lisa

    Lisa commented on :

    For me I work from 9am to 5pm Monday through to Friday. In my role I dont need to pull really long hours which is one of the reasons that it works really well for me 🙂

  • Photo: Ashleigh

    Ashleigh commented on :

    I work for in industry, at the moment I’m spending 2-3 days per week in the lab where I’m either working on new ideas for laser products or supporting the technicians building the current laser products. The rest of the time I’m working on my computer analysing data, making sure what I’m developing meets the specification, having meetings with the other engineers etc.