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Asked by nathen to Andrew on 17 Jun 2015.
Question: what did you last week?
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Andrew Fensham-Smith answered on 17 Jun 2015:
A typical day for me – get up at 6.50am. Make my wife lunch, coffee, have breakfast, leave for work at 8.00am, arrive at 8.30am. Set up my fume hood and work up whatever was reacting overnight. Have a quick cup of tea at 10.30am-11am. Then more lab-work, lunch 12.30-1pm. Tea at 3.30-4pm, then work until 5.30-6pm, then home! Repeat five days a week. Sometimes I’ll come in on a weekend because people aren’t here which means the machines which people want to use are free for me to use them. I came in for around 6-8 hours last weekend.
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Jessica commented on :
I wake up super early- around 04:30. I like to be in the lab when no one else is there. I cycle in at 05:30 and get to work at 06:00. Then I warm up all of my lasers, because they take some time to get to the right temperature to work properly. Last week I was doing lots of experiments looking and mixing different molecules, and every day I did very long experiments all morning. Usually at 07:00 I go swimming (when our pool opens). I then return to the lab and spend the rest of the day increasing the temperature of my mixtures or my devices by 10 C a minute, taking a few important measurements, then heat them a bit more. Eventually I get to 350 C (super hot)- sometimes all my mixture has evaporated. I then cool the materials down to see what happens when they come back to room temperature. Sometimes they survive the heat, but sometimes I’ve frazzled them and I can’t understand what is going on!
Jessica commented on :
I should have finished my day! Oops. I was too distracted by cooking dinner ;). I usually go through my data over lunchtime and check what is going on in my materials. I always bring in a packed lunch because I love to cook so much! I go and talk to lots of different people in the physics department. Today, all of the first year students are showing their summer projects, so I’m going to go along and check them out. Around 15:00 I get a cup of tea, and start to plan what more I need to do to finish my work for the day. I usually give a science talk or lecture at some stage in the afternoon. I cycle home at 17:30- then straight to the kitchen!