Question: 1. To what extent is the prize money going benefit you and science? 2. How much money do you earn a year? 3. How is your job important overall? 4. Out of 10, how would you rate fellow opponents as scientists? 5. How many hours do you work a day? Are they productive?

Robin Stafford Allen answered on 12 Mar 2012:

@09barrt1: 1) The prize money will go into a CCFE fund which helps primary and secondary schools with grants of money to develop science programs at school. Sometimes it is a Stevenson screen for studying the weather and sometimes bird-boxes or data-loggers, but all the money helps schools and local community projects achieve more.
2) Not enough of course! but actually I always tell people that in engineering you are unlikely to get very rich, but you will always have a job that you find enjoyable and will almost always be in work. Companies are always short of good engineering staff.
3) I work in a team. Each one is responsible for the design of part of the final assembly and each part must work for the whole thing to work. At the moment I am working on the system that heats the plasma in the ITER machine to get it hot enough for the fusion process to start.
4) You know as much as I do about my fellow competitors, as i have read their profiles, and they scare the hell out of me with the standard of the work they do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5) I work from 7:30 to around 4 to 4:30 on most days and help with guiding visitors around the JET machine in the evenings a few times a month. So I do not do long hours compared to other people really, it just seems it sometime, particularly to my wife……and are they productive? I would have said many times more so than when I started engineering when there were no computer applications for doing what we can do now and nearly all documents had to be typed by secretaries and typists! Different world back then. Regards Robin