• Question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of your research/topic?

    Asked by 10darcya to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by palmerrachael14.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Hmm, the advantages are:
      – I get to travel alot!
      – I get to make lots of maps, which is fun!
      – The way I analyse data is a bit different from the way most people look at it. I incorporate maps of things like land cover, rainfall and temperature into my analysis – this lets us find out much more than you would using more traditional methods.

      Disadvantages
      – Some of the methods take AGES to run on a computer – I ran something once that took all week!

    • Photo: Norman Lazarus

      Norman Lazarus answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      A very interesting question. OK, I try and understand the mechanisms underlying ageing. This research if successful could make people live longer and healthier lives. That does not seem to bad but we need to ask who will look after all these people when they are coming to the end of their lives, will they take jobs from young people wil there be enough money for pensions, enough hospital beds. These are terrible questions. Perhaps it may be time for young people to begin to give these dilemmas some thought.

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Well, I think the advantages are that I get to choose to learn about whatever I am interested in, I get to feel like I am contributing something to human knowledge that might help us someday, I get to look at loads of really cool extinct animals and go behind the scenes at museums and I get free trips to really interesting countries.

      There’s probably only one disadvantage for me and that’s that I have to spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer doing analyses, sometimes I take my laptop and work outside though to make myself feel better about it.

    • Photo: Thanasis Georgiou

      Thanasis Georgiou answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Advantages – It’s cutting edge research in a field where it is a matter of time on how it will affect our everyday life. Seeing

      Disadvantages- It’s quite competitive! Many people doing the same thing means you have to push yourself hard and get to the results first. But of course, its worth it

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Advantages – save lives! Helps women to stay healthy.

      Disadvantages- can be really really difficult to detect some abnormal cells sometimes, it’s not 100% accurate. You’re looking at 150,000 cells on one slides, some are very tricky to determine an abnormality in.

      But the training is extensive, it takes two years to qualify. You have to do a full diploma in gynae screening, be heavily examined, go on loads of long courses and screen at least 5000 slides accurately, and you must not miss any abnormal cells or it is an instant fail.

      And sometimes women don’t come for their screening. Or don’t turn up for treatment. It’s believed that those ladies that do get cancer or die, do so because they haven’t been screened or had their treatment 🙁 This makes me so very sad.

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