Not in my current work. In my previous jobs I have made a few mistakes that I thought were pretty big at the time, but I’ve found if you are open and honest about such things then people will usually be understanding.
I was part of a group last year that tried to make objects made of sugar using a laser 3d printer. Whilst we were kind of successful at printing sugar… We pretty much destroyed the machine due to molten sugar getting everywhere (on the bright side the lab smelt very nice).
In all seriousness though, for research it’s all about making mistakes and trying to come up with solutions.
I did a summer placement at a big car company and it was the last day before a two week holiday and we needed to collect some data or it would have to wait two weeks, and we collected the data but unfortunately I saved it in the wrong way so it was unusable so we had to wait two weeks to do it again – it doesn’t sound too bad except they were loosing something like a million pounds a day because of the problem we were trying to fix – oops. Luckily I was only a student and the bosses were very understanding. We are all human and make mistakes.
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