• Question: How did you get into that particular field (of biology)?

    Asked by lily4 to Rachael, Penny, Jennifer on 10 Jan 2014.
    • Photo: Penelope Mason

      Penelope Mason answered on 10 Jan 2014:

      I’m not sure how useful my answer will be because I didn’t have a particular plan to end up here at all. I always wanted to do some kind of Medicine/Biology at school, and ended up wanting to do biological sciences because I quite like the rigour and thinking involved – learning exact mechanisms, finding similarities and differences between things, applying these correlations to new situations and finding ways to test for the truth of your ideas.

      Because of this, and because I absolutely loved the big practical project I did at the end of my degree, I definitely wanted to do a PhD, but I didn’t have a particular field I wanted to be in. I did my project on chromatin remodelling, and became really interested in DNA metabolism, but I applied for a number of PhDs as it’s a large field. Finding a good PhD is just as much about lab environment and the people as it is about the actual project.

      I ended up looking at DNA repair in mitochondria (mitochondria have their own genome), and as many theories of ageing have mitochondrial metabolism as a key part in the process, and others in my research group worked on this, I started being interested in mechanisms of ageing. At the end of my PhD I speculatively applied to some labs in America and ended up at the NIH working on ageing and DNA metabolism both in mitochondria and the nucleus. After that I came back to Oxford and kept on working upon similar lines.

      So mostly I just built upon what I had done before. I think if you have an early plan to join a particular field it can be useful as you can start looking at good labs and networking now, but if you don’t really know, it’s not a problem – and your ideas will change as you learn more and more anyway…

    • Photo: Rachael Inglis

      Rachael Inglis answered on 10 Jan 2014:

      Similar to Penny, I never really had a plan either! I think I’ve ended up being a developmental biologist through just choosing the subjects that I’m interested in and enjoy studying, and by taking opportunities that have come along.

      I studied genetics at university, and I chose that degree because I really enjoyed the problem solving aspect of it, as well as learning about how genes operate to control…well, most things! But I also considered other subjects before making that decision, including zoology and psychology, because I enjoyed them too. In the end, I think genetics was a useful subject to study because genes are important in every area of biology, and my classmates from uni have gone on to work in a range of different fields.

      I decided to do a PhD because I really enjoyed the practical work in lab projects, and because I wanted to be involved in real research and find out things that nobody knew before! Then I chose developmental biology because it was my favourite of the topics I had learned about during my degree, and I wanted to know more about it.

      Something that’s really good about being a scientist is that, in the earlier part of your career at least, it’s quite common to switch topics. People usually work in a few different labs through their time as a student and then in a couple more as a post doc (after getting a PhD), so you can try out different things and if you become interested in something new and decide that you want to work on that instead, there is often the opportunity to do it.

      If you do have a plan, and you know that there’s a particular field that you’re interested in, then certainly try and find out as much about it as you like, and choose to study the subjects at school/university that will be most relevant to working in that field. But there are a lot of interesting topics out there, and I think that the more you learn about, the more you find that there are even more new and exciting things to be interested in! So if you end up not sticking to the plan, then that’s fine too 🙂

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