Health Science Reviews

by Paige Mackenzie

At the start of the new year, I knew very little about what doing an honours meant. As an undergrad we read a lot of papers, looked at a lot of graphs and memorised a lot of things. Now as much as I found that interesting – all I could think about was how much I didn’t know. How did the authors come up with a question? How did they figure out which experiments to run? How did they know that those results meant one thing and not the other? How did they decide that their solution made sense? I had so many questions and insecurities about how the postgraduate world worked.

Since then, things have become a little clearer. I have since found out that researchers come up with topics by being curious. There is a lot of ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ and ‘huh – that’s weird’. There is also a lot of ‘well that didn’t work’, and even more of ‘I guess we’ll have to try again tomorrow’. When you’re learning about science, you’re taught that things happen in a “introduction then methods then results then discussion” way. When you become a scientist, you quickly learn that it doesn’t happen like that. The flow diagram looks more like a spider’s web of asking, trying, failing, talking and then trying again. Your phone’s camera roll turns into a gallery representing confusion and success. You spend hours and hours making buffers and cleaning. You come up with strange acronyms and nicknames for your samples and the machines you use – so much so that conversations with your labmates become its own kind of science.

Hours, days, weeks and eventually months of this pass and eventually – you become a little scientist. A little scientist who still has a lot to learn, but a little scientist nonetheless. There are some wins and many losses.

Essentially, you learn that being curious is more important than knowing the answer. I am not sure that this is entirely what doing an honours means, but it is certainly a little bit of it. And to be honest, I think it might be my favourite part.