Will all science careers involve writing long reports?

Science has been my idea of a career for a while now and I was considering doing chemistry at university although I recently did the CREST Silver research project that involved writing a long report about our research and I completely hated it. I said this to my teacher who said all science related jobs will involve writing reports like this so I better get used to it

Is this true? If so it would make me reconsider my options as I really like science although I can't do with writing essays in which case it might not be the choice for me.

Reply 1

Nymthae

Original post by matalyst

Not necessarily. If you work in pure (upstream) R&D you'll find yourself writing more (for patents, for internal records, internal communications), but if you stick to development/formulation-type roles (or 'downstream' R&D) then you're more focused on the end application and making products - the main thing there is your lab book as a record, but lab books inherently shouldn't be long essays.

Regards to the degree:
yes you'll have to do some longer lab reports, though most of them are not huge in your early years (i.e. a few pages, rather than 10,000+ words)
you may have to do literature reviews, and of course an eventual dissertation/thesis project which is long and arduous but it doesn't happen all the time and once you've been working on a research project for six months you tend to have enough to write about at least.

The exact nature of undergraduate lab reports will vary based on the place. The majority of mine were just answering questions and calculating/presenting data based off what we did. I had one 'long' report in first year (~2000 words), then one long lab report for each section in second year (physical, inorganic, organic - so 3) but the organic one was something like a ~4 page limit, the inorganic was longer because it was spread out over 2 weeks, and physical just had a lot of data in it. I spent a year out in industry so I had to produce a written report (I think I wrote about 12,000 words but it's a lot about your own inclination and project but it was pretty easy to write because of working in that area full time) - normal students did a literature review project which was much smaller. Thesis for the MChem/final year project 8000-12000 words on average for most candidates.

Basically: there's a few rubbish weeks where you have to write reports, but over 3 or 4 years it's actually not that much.