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Asked by anon-217070 to Philippe, Harrison, Edoardo, Savannah, Lucy, Joanna on 14 Jun 2019.
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Philippe Gambron answered on 14 Jun 2019:
Not at all. On the contrary and this is quite a problem. This is very specialised. People become really specialised in their topic and they don’t talk anymore enough to each other.
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Edoardo Vescovi answered on 14 Jun 2019: last edited 14 Jun 2019 6:08 pm
No, because this job asks you to be one kind of scientist.
My colleagues and I never use the word “scientist”, rather “researcher”. It says what we do (research, in office or lab) and don’t do often (teaching, administration, outreach, collaboration with industry). Given this, researchers can be in biology, medicine, computer science, astronomy, archeology… up to us in physics. And still physics is huge. For example, I’m a theoretical physicist with a focus on some models rather than others. Universities hire specialists in a sub-topic. The reason is that is better to have thousands of specialised researchers — each solving one specific problem — rather than thousands of generic ones. For example, a medical doctor can cure a certain disease, while an architect can build one type of bridge. Two generic professionals can neither cure nor build.
Of course, while we can’t solve other problems, we all have a generic knowledge of other sub-topics. -
Harrison Prosper answered on 15 Jun 2019:
No, you do not! But, in my opinion, to be a good scientist you need to be well educated. You need to know some history, you need to know some geography, you need to know how to write well, and you need to have some knowledge of literature, etc. So, please do not neglect these subjects.
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Savannah Clawson answered on 17 Jun 2019:
Definitely not! For example, I dropped biology after GCSE when I was 16 years old and I have done absolutely fine in my field of physics. However, I think that most scientists will take an interest in other science because we like to know how the world works! Even though I dropped biology when I was 16 and I definitely would not be very good at it now, I still try to keep up to date with important discoveries in it. So don’t worry if you don’t think you’re very good at ALL science – the main thing is that you stay interested in what you want to study and try to keep up to date with any big discoveries going on in the world 🙂
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Lucy Budge answered on 18 Jun 2019:
Definitely not!! Maths is useful for all science but you don’t have to be amazing at it. For particle physics you don’t need to know any biology or chemistry, but you do need a fair amount of maths. On the other hand to do many aspects of biology you won’t need physics knowledge and the maths part is (or can be) much lighter.
Often the sciences have very similar skills needed, so if someone is good at one they are often good at all of them but you don’t have to be. And many subjects are very different at university (or even A level) compared to GCSE and below.
If you like a field of science (but not the others) – go for it!
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Joanna Huang answered on 19 Jun 2019:
No no no, you needn’t be that. The only really crucial skill is the ability to solve problems and the ability to LEARN! Because in science, you will be constantly learning, non-stop.
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