Question: what made you choose this job?????

Christian Wirtz answered on 10 Nov 2013:

This question is kind of difficult to answer without writing down my biography here but I’ll try to give it a shot:

I’ve always loved doing science, especially physics and chemistry and therefore did a college degree in a combination of the two. From the courses I had taken I realised that nanoscience is an area that interests me a lot and I decided I wanted do some research in the field after finishing college.
There are many places where one can do that, in universities but also in industrial settings (for example working for microchip companies like Intel or AMD).
Rather than going into industry I chose to stay in university research (earning significantly less money that one could in industry) because after a few years (3 -4 years) of doing research in a university I can write up all my results and submit them as a thesis. If this is accepted and I then pass an examination I will have the title of “Dr.” which opens many more doors. So you could say that decision was a career move in order to get even higher qualifications than I already had from my college degree. Jessamyn has finished such a program already and has the title of “Dr.”
The specific research I do now was not exactly what I imagined I would do which is not to say it’s bad. It’s kind of like picking a new subject in school: There are the parts you expect but a lot of it is nothing like you imagined, sometimes in a positive and sometimes in a negative kind of way.