There are three reasons I knew that I wasn't meant to be a scientist even though I spent the past four years being in science and being in academia.

There are three reasons I knew that I wasn't meant to be a scientist even though I spent the past four years being in science and being in academia. First off, I knew that I spent a lot more time on the presentations and on the communication of the research more so than actually conducting or analyzing the research. What I mean by that, for all of my journal clubs, I was made really nice, fancy presentations, but then I didn't actually think about, oh, how this applied to my future research or oh, how this, how could we have done this differently? And that was actually a pitfall in my PhD interviews because they wanted me to analyze scientific research and kinda restructure the methods if I could, but then I couldn't ever really think of it in that way. Second is data analysis, and this was also one of my pitfalls in science is although I spent a lot of my time doing data analysis and I have a pretty strong background in statistics as well, the problem is I would always kind of like try to do my data analysis or do my tables or do things like that as soon as possible. I spent more time on the figures than the actual statistics part. And so I would sometimes get, um, notes from my mentor saying, oh, this is slightly wrong, or, oh, you did this too fast. Like make sure to double check and triple check your data management. I just didn't really wanna do that. I always rushed through it, which is very sad to say, but it was something that I knew that if I wanted to do a dissertation, I wasn't gonna be able to actually, like, go through that part of the process in an enjoyable way. The last thing that I genuinely cannot stand is how after you leave an institution but a research project isn't done, you still are expected to contribute to that research project even if you have a lot of other commitments in your own life. So let's say you leave your undergrad institution and you go into a master's program. Sometimes they'll expect you to complete your undergraduate work even though you're in the master's program, even though you've got a whole life outside of this research project. They expect you to also do it for free, so you're not even getting compensated for this experience. And I've had that happen through every stage of my research career, and that was when I realised I can't do this forever.