• Question: are you the only person trying to find out the same information as you or is it just you?

    Asked by anon-234828 to Tim.M, Rose, Paul, Meirin, Jo, Chloe, Ananthi on 19 Sep 2019.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 19 Sep 2019:

      When you do a PhD – yes. You must focus on something novel, unique, something not previously discovered.

      You can still work in a team, and each person will focus on a different aspect of the same thing. You also find that a lot of people have done something *similar*, but not *exactly* the same as what you are trying to do. So, many people look for the same information, but what they do with it is different, fueling new discoveries.

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 19 Sep 2019:

      Dmitry’s answer is spot on for me too.
      I’m the only person doing the work I do, but it all fits into the work being done by a huge team (of about 5000 people!)

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 20 Sep 2019:

      Other people are looking at the same sorts of questions as me, but I hope I’m the only one doing exactly what I do. Sometimes with science, you might do something very similar to what someone else has done, but just change one small detail to see if it has an effect on your results. In this way, we can slowly build our knowledge of something. It’s a bit like every experiment is a paintbrush stroke and by adding all of them together we slowly build up a clearer picture of the thing we are studying 🙂

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