• Question: What has been your proudest achievement as a scientist.

    Asked by anon-235994 to Rachel, Priya, Jessica, Dan, Beatrice on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Jessica Pope

      Jessica Pope answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Great question! For me, so far, it has been actually getting on to my PhD programme. There were only 6 places and nearly 70 people applied, so it was really tough. But I was passionate about my research and confident in my ability to do it well. I think when I get further along and start talking to cancer survivors (that’s the group of people I’m studying for my PhD) that will be my proudest moment – I’ll feel like I’ve really helped someone.

    • Photo: Priya Silverstein

      Priya Silverstein answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      I think publishing my first paper in an academic journal was my proudest achievement. I was especially proud because it went against what was commonly believed in my field, as we didn’t find the same results as a very famous study that did the same thing as we did.

    • Photo: Beatrice Hayes

      Beatrice Hayes answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Last summer I went to Greece for a summer school. It was really hard to get on and I was so proud to have been given a place. I had so much fun learning about Psychology and I also made a lot of friends 🙂

    • Photo: Rachel Reid

      Rachel Reid answered on 9 Mar 2020: last edited 9 Mar 2020 4:48 pm

      I think the big one for me and definitely the most time consuming thing too was putting together my 40,000 word thesis during the last year of the Educational Psychology course and then defending that thesis in what is known as a ‘viva’. In case you haven’t heard of a viva it is basically a meeting with at least two examiners and they ask lots of questions about your research and about why you did what you did and they may wish to ask you to reflect on what you would’ve done differently. It sounds scary and I guess the idea of it definitely was, however, I would also say that there is no one who knows your research as well as you do – and finally you have a captive audience to talk to about all that work you did!

    • Photo: Dan O'Hare

      Dan O'Hare answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Great question! Definitely one of the proudest moments for me was when I qualified as an educational psychologists – it was something I’d been working towards for 9 years!

      I’m also super proud of the website I set up for educational psychologists – http://www.edpsy.org.uk – it’s been really well received and lots of my colleagues seem to really value it.

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