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How does working in the field of research work? (1 Viewer)

wagig

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Hey everyone,
I've been thinking recently that I'd like to major in Neuroscience. I know that many of the job opportunities coming out of Neuroscience involve research, but I'm currently in year 12 and have no clue how research jobs work. Could anyone clarify?
Thanks
 

Trebla

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Hey everyone,
I've been thinking recently that I'd like to major in Neuroscience. I know that many of the job opportunities coming out of Neuroscience involve research, but I'm currently in year 12 and have no clue how research jobs work. Could anyone clarify?
Thanks
Basically you immerse yourself in literature to get up to date with the latest research in your area and then work on something new that hasn't been done before or in some cases try to replicate the experiments noted in the literature.
 

Xt

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Just to add to what Trebla said, research is just reading many articles in your very very narrow field (e.g. a specific protein or gene involved in a specific biological pathway involved in a specific disease). Once you've finished researching what is already known out there, you come up with your own experiments, aims, and go about trying to work on them. In general, there will be PhD students or Post-docs (phd grads) who will teach you the techniques.

While research sounds amazing, half the time you'll basically be trouble-shooting. Basically, your experiments will hardly ever work the first time around and you need to repeat the experiment and change one variable at a time until it starts working - can be very draining at times, especially when it takes a month to fix a certain experiment.

You'll also have weekly meetings with the entire team, and you'll present what you've done the previous week and how you've gone about trying to fix your experiments or what experiments you want to do because you think it will uncover some important answer.

Once you start running your own lab (after phd and couple years of work experience) you'll end up doing mostly admin stuff. That is you'll be writing reports to gain funding (Grants), you'll be asked to review newly submitted scientific articles (from 'Journals' i.e. Cell, Science, & Nature are examples), and you'll design experiments for your employees to work on, and then review the results. Funnily enough, the higher you go, the less lab work you do.
 

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