• Question: Have you ever been in the situation where you have finished a project and then maybe a few days later you have realised something else that could have helped the project run quicker?

    Asked by anon-241042 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 18 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      There are often lots of ways to do a project, which means that you probably won’t pick the best one! I’m still getting frustrated by bits of my code I wrote near the start of my PhD when I didn’t know Python (computer programming language) very well. You can’t think about what you should have done too much though beyond trying to learn from your mistakes because then you aren’t thinking about what needs to be done!

    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      No necessarily a project, but there have been lots of times where I realised I could have done an experiment much more efficiently than I did. It’s why making notes of what you did, and being flexible and changing things sometimes can be really important 🙂

    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      A fair few times. As Ben and Emily have already said, there are so many ways of testing the same hypothesis that you’re almost never likely to find the “best” one immediately. We’re still altering the way we work on the weather radar project that I’m currently part of, even though we’re almost a full year into it. You have to be quite flexible in your approach to science experiments, and not worry too much about being wrong (working out where you went wrong is one way science evolves).

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