• Question: How long do you work for in a week?

    Asked by anon-187119 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Laura Kent

      Laura Kent answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      I work full time and where I work that means 36 hours a week! Sometimes I work a little bit more than that if I have a deadline or if the tests I am doing requires that I stay later – but that is rare!

    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Most weeks I average about forty hours. I don’t have rigid hours that I need to be in the office, so it changes from week to week — sometimes I’ll have a lot of work to do so I’ll do more, and other times I’ll leave a bit early and relax for a bit!

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      I normally work 9-5, 5 days a week. Sometimes I have to travel or finish work at evenings or weekends, but I try to make sure I don’t work too much overtime. This is for two reasons:

      1)I enjoy my work, but I like to do other things as well

      2)You get less effective at working if you put in long hours. And sometimes not thinking about a problem gives your brain time to understand it better, particularly after a good sleep.

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      So I should do 40 hours a week. But really I will work for however long it takes to do my work.

      Phd’s are a lot more free form in terms of work output. By the end of 3.5 years I would hope to have 3 papers written on my research and all my work written into one big book called a thesis. But if my project includes running a lot of code I won’t be putting in many hours because the code runs on its own and gives me the results at the end and then I write those results into a paper. Another project might analysing data from a star or planet and requires more effort from me. So some weeks I will work 40 hours, but others I might be working a lot less because I am waiting for code to give me results. (very occasionally I will work more hours but thats only if I have a deadline coming up).

      In terms of hours i’m not a morning person so I tend to work 10-6 rather than 9-5. I also sometimes work from home in which case I might work on and off all day! It’s not at rigid as office work!

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