Career in Neuroscience Essay Example
A neuroscientist is someone who society can depend on to research how the human brain functions on a biological level. Their goal is to research and answer questions about the nervous system and the other parts of the body that work alongside it like the brain and nerve cells. You can expect to find neurosciencetist mostly in labs but you can also find them in governments, hospitals, and even in education, to name a few workplaces. To be an expert at neuroscience one needs to obtain a Ph.D. for neuroscience, be able to carry out experiments and analyze the results, possess skills such as being analytical, and a good problem solver, and be able to share their research findings with others.
The first step to most careers is to get an education for it. Most students who want to pursue a career in neuroscience choose to gain their undergraduate degree in neuroscience or a similar field along those lines such as biology, chemistry, or even psychology. Then, most will move on to get their masters in neuroscience. How I Got The Job explains that in the master’s degree program “will dwell more on practicals and clinical lab experiments”. It also explains that the person will be “exposed to advanced learning and teachings”. The master’s program dives deeper into what a neuroscientist will see in their day to day life and give students a taste of the career they are stepping into. After obtaining a masters, one needs to also achieve a Ph.D. which will hone a person’s knowledge on one specific subfield like cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiology, or neurobiology. Having an expertise in one sub field of neuroscience narrows down a student’s options of where and what job they will be doing once they enter the workforce which gives them a greater chance of becoming an expert at it. Most students think this step is not necessary but, most careers in neuroscience require this high of a degree since it provides the most efficient work.
After getting all the degrees that certify a student as an expert at neuroscience, they can expect to be working in a lab doing research on disorders that affect the nervous system, and brain diseases, such as Alzimer’s, to find out ways to slow them or exterminate them completely. Other workplace options can include hospitals, private firms, pharmaceutical companies, or even universities (How I Got The Job). Because one will be running experiments most of the time, they will need to possess excellent problem-solving and critical thinking skills since most of the time they will need to think outside of the box to come up with answers. Having the motivation and drive to want to have answers to questions produced by these experiments is crucial for this career. To perform this research How I Got The Job explains how a neuroscientist will use numerous machines to create stimulations to “study how brain conditions can be eliminated”. Along with those machines, an expert will also use numerous experimental techniques and other instruments that track brain function and how the brain responds to specific compounds. On top of that, they will also be expected to be able to extract brain cells and tissues to view under a microscope using dyes and antibodies to discover nerve cells they are doing research on. An expert in this field is expected to “ conduct in-depth research, clinical experiments, trials, and publish their findings” as How I Got The Job states it.
The job is not only about running experiments in a lab, it also includes being able to share findings with the neuroscience community and even medical practitioners or doctors. Even though proper communication is a key for any job, it is especially important for portraying results of an experiment correctly and in an efficient way or answering questions based on clinical trials done since an expert in this field is expected to be a reliable source for clients or patients. If a person is not able to convey the results of an experiment clearly enough, it can make one’s job more difficult than it needs to be and cause unneeded issues.
Communication and writing skills aren’t the only important skills needed to be an expert neuroscientist, perfect reading skills to keep up with other experts' experiments and findings is also an important factor. One website for neuroscientists to keep up with what’s happening in the community is Neuroscience News. This site compiles studies and research that has been done on all sorts of different topics.While most of the articles posted on the website are short reads, only about 10 minutes at the most, at the end of each article there are links if a person would like to discover more of the issue. For instance, one interesting article, “A New Type Of Cellular Communication in the Brain” explains how Scripps Research has found “hundreds of new proteins that are constantly transported throughout the healthy brain in small membrane-enclosed sacs, revealing a new form of communication between brain cells”. under the article,' there was a link to Scripps Research website, the author, and an even original longer report of the experiment with lots of more details. When looking at the writing, It talks about processes in the brain that any non-expert in the field would understand, such as retinal ganglion cells, synuclein, tau, and neurodegeneration. Looking even further at the original research writing it includes even more processes a regular person would not understand such as, Mass spectrometry, Exosomes, and Transneuronally transported proteins. Using vocabulary like this shows that the articles posted are not just for any person, they are for experts in the field wanting to discover more about others research. Neuroscience News is a place where all types of different research and experiments can be compiled and, if an expert is more curious about a certain topic, they can read more into detail and even find more information on the organization who performed it. This website can be used as a search engine to research more in depth into topics and experiments.
There are countless unanswered questions about the different systems that make up the human body and how it functions that lots of people want to know answers to. As a researcher that runs numerous tests and experiments on these things, doctors, patients, and other colleges look to an expert neuroscientist for those answers.
