• Question: Who or what inspired you to do your job today?

    Asked by mbale25 on 8 Jan 2018. This question was also asked by shakespare, anna132, leilapops06, katiestaceyuk, 17fdejong, 17tmorrissey, Bethany x, 10khaidarovad, giraffe.
    • Photo: Wendy M. Grossman

      Wendy M. Grossman answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      My goals for today were three things: sketch out a talk I’m due to give in a couple of weeks so I can send a summary to the organizer and see if it’s what she had in mind; finish and send a news digest I prepare which is due tomorrow morning; and get started on a piece I’ve been delaying for way too long. Plus make a big pot of soup and tidy up the house because I have a guest coming tomorrow. Each one of those things has a different motivator. The digest it’s the deadline. The delayed piece it’s embarrassment. The talk is procrastination for the delayed piece. The soup is because I bought the makings for it yesterday and need to use them while they’re still fresh. And I need the guest to be able to walk into the house without tripping on anything.

      wg

    • Photo: Alyssa Alcorn

      Alyssa Alcorn answered on 9 Jan 2018:

      If by “job today” you mean current job, rather than literally today…
      I was not inspired to work in this area. I ended up in it rather by accident, doing a masters project on autism and technology because it was one of the few options my department offered that I thought I could do well (I was in a masters programme which was not a very good fit for me!). Technologies for autism turned out to be a mix of human-computer interaction, psychology, education, and design. It was a mix of work with people, and alone at the computer. It has become much more of an identifiable, mainstream field in the 8 years since I started doing this type of work.

      I was inspired to *stay* in this type of job because it turned out that I liked it, and could see that there were a lot of unsolved problems in the area. Many technologies often aren’t meeting the needs of people on the autism spectrum very well, even when they say “autism” on them. I think it’s important to improve what we (as technologists/designers/researchers) do until needs ARE being met. It’s also an area where commercial companies are unlikely to try solving those problems and meeting needs, because there’s just no money in it.

    • Photo: Freya Wilson

      Freya Wilson answered on 10 Jan 2018:

      The inspiration for me doing the secret communications project was probably my supervisor. He came in when I was doing my masters project and went ‘I have an idea, what if we did *this*’ and out lined it. It was a great idea! We bounced ideas off each other until we had something that looked like a project outline. I was inspired by the idea that it might solve a problem that a lot of people have been trying to figure out, especially people who care a lot about privacy like banks, or the government.

      My inspiration in general for doing physics is solving problems. Whether it is be developing a new way to deliver life saving drugs to patients, or better building materials that can survive natural disasters, or ways of making computers faster and more capable of solving complex problems.

      As for inspiration specifically today – I decided I wanted to be in work early because a colleague is giving a presentation on a new way of hacking into computers that I’ve not heard of before.

    • Photo: Daniel Mills

      Daniel Mills answered on 10 Jan 2018:

      Sir Robert Hinde, who gave a visiting lecture when I was studying to be a vet. his lecture was on the interdependence of the behaviour sciences and made me realise that being a vet might actually help answer some questions about animal behaviour, as a vet degree teaches you a little about a lot of scientific subjects it often means I can bring together scientific specialists from different areas to work on a problem from different perspectives, e.g understanding the physiology as well as the psychology of the problem.

    • Photo: Eloise Ainger

      Eloise Ainger answered on 16 Jan 2018:

      When I first began learning about psychology I didn’t really like it at all, and I nearly didn’t continue with it, but the more I learnt about different disorders I started to become really interested in it. It wasn’t until I started working with children with autism that I became really interested.
      I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with psychology though, even up until I was 19 years old. Working with very passionate and intelligent lecturers and Psychologists really inspired me to continue learning and pursue my career in this field and the more people I meet doing this job just makes me want to do it even more!

    • Photo: Phillip Burnett

      Phillip Burnett answered on 17 Jan 2018:

      My love for animals and a desire to help them was what drove me to get the role i currently have. I loved having pets as a youngster and caring for them. I also absolutely loved, and still do, the nature shows like Life, Planet Earth, Blue planet and thus David Attenborough has most certainly been an inspiration.

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