Question: what did you want to be when you grow up

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 10 Nov 2014:

I always wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. What *kind* of scientist I wanted to be was always changing though, because when you’re young you just don’t know how many kinds of science are out there.

When I was a kid I thought all science was the same thing. I learned that were was chemistry, physics and biology. But each of those has loads of subsections; Biology could be broken down into things like zoology, botany, microbiology, ecology and more. I chose microbiology, and discovered it had even more subsections: Did I want to be a bacteriologist, a virologist, a pathologist?

That’s how it goes, really. There’s far too much for anyone to ever know, so you end up finding the bits that interest you most and specialising in them. Bioinformatics didn’t exist when I was growing up, it’s like a combination of biology, statistics and computer science, and it’s a great way of working with enormous sets of information like DNA or protein analysis. A couple of colleges started offering degrees in it in the last decade, and UCC started a course in something like 2008 or 2009, and I thought that was new and interesting, so I went from microbiologist to bioinformatician. Now I’m doing this PhD which is a combination of microbiology and bioinformatics. Who knows, after I graduate I’ll find some other interesting looking kind of science and want to be one of those 🙂