Question: is it easy to do your job?

Lin Shuyu answered on 12 Nov 2019:

Um, do you want to hear honest answer?

The short answer is ‘No.’
Slightly longer answer is ‘It’s very challenging!’

The long answer is:
There is no easy job if you want to do well in a field, so our work is as hard as any other jobs. To me, the most difficult challenge is the loneliness when one is doing research, especially in academia. As we are working on very novel problems/ideas/concepts, it’s inevitably hard to find another person doing exactly the same thing with compatible knowledge for fruitful discussion. Therefore, most of times, we are just working alone on the problems we are determined to solve. We have to face it alone for seemingly unsolvable problems. Even for the extremely exciting moments of publications being accepted or finally having debugged a long-standing bugs in the code, we laugh alone. So I have to say research is not easy and is probably better suited for people with clear motivation or strong determination. If research is something you want to do, then probably start to find your motivation.