• Question: Have you ever just given up with an experiment/research and just left it aside?

    Asked by BeckyJadeR to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 17 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by K3VIN XH, E_kelleher.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      The simple answer is yes. Sometimes, when something does not want to work it is easier to find an alternative method. Unfortunatley even an intereting piece of research can be sidelined if the experiment is not working as your supervisor would want some tangible results.

      In my short career so far I had an opportunity to follow an interesting project till the end without any positive results, cos both me and my supervisor knew we were trying to do something really difficult with a low chance of success. On other occasions I had to abandon a project a week after I started cos the initial results were not good enough and would not have produced enough data to write a decent report.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      I’m not a quitter (although sometimes I would like to be!) and when one of my reactions wasn’t working after I’d spent a month trying to make it work, my supervisor told me I had to move on and try something else. It was very frustrating and even now I want to go back and try it again! But even a negative result is still a result so I had to take that as a result that it wasn’t going to work.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Yes. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stomped out of the lab in a huff! After a relaxing night though, and sleeping on it, I’ve usually been able to come back to the experiment – sometimes the next day, but more usually a week or so later (i’ve been in and done other experiments in the meantime) I’ll try again having thought about the problem, and then usually it works better!

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Probably only once – I and my colleagues could not figure out a model to interpret a spectral bandshape change with composition in water vs organic solvent…still puzzling!

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Thankfully I’ve been quite lucky with a lot of my projects in that they have worked to some extent, though a few have turned out to be less interesting than I’d hope so although I try to complete the project, it ends up not being as important as expected.

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