• Question: What challenges do you face when doing your engineering and how do you overcome them?

    Asked by 538heak43 to Carmel on 3 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Carmel Howe

      Carmel Howe answered on 3 Nov 2017:

      Most of the challenges are when experiments don’t go as I expect them to. My experimental work involves a lot of different equipment (and live brain cells!) so it seems sometimes stuff doesn’t work together. However, when it does it’s completely incredible!
      Being able to keep calm under pressure, slow yourself down, take a few deep breaths and think logically about what is going wrong really helps to overcome the problems… Or sometimes just admitting defeat and coming back the next day to try again.

Comments

  • Photo: 472heak37

    472heak37 commented on :

    that is a good solution!

  • Photo: Kath

    Kath commented on :

    I think similarly to Carmel the main challenge is to keep working to find solutions when nothing is working properly to keep positive and keep doing good work.
    It can be very tempting in science and engineering to take short cuts to try and get results,as a lot of the preparation I do takes a really long time (easily a couple of days if not a week to make 1 type of coatings). However, to get good results and make sure that what you’re doing is ‘good science’ you have to keep reminding yourself to take pride in your work and just keep doing the best you possibly can.
    The most important thing is to ask for help when you need it and have faith in your own ability. Sometimes help isn’t someone doing the thing for you, its just a cup of tea or chatting about something unrelated to remind you that work isn’t your entire life. Sometimes I just have to go home, and do something totally different to have a break. I have really good friends at work and outside of it, so often we have an engineering moan and try and offer a fresh perspective on each others problems.