• Question: What is the hardest question or problem you have ever done

    Asked by sown534dote63 on 3 Nov 2025. This question was also asked by vote534dote63, know534harm62, fado534harm62, HollyJ, haet534joss89.
    • Photo: Kirsty Ross

      Kirsty Ross answered on 3 Nov 2025:

      Many things that I work on are difficult in different ways. Some involve a lot of logistics, ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it is balancing perspectives to try and come to a compromise that works for the majority of people. For me, it has been managing my career, especially when I was working on multiple projects at multiple universities, whilst also attempting to juggle life in general! Not 100% sure if that was the intent of your question though…

    • Photo: Luke Humphrey

      Luke Humphrey answered on 20 Nov 2025:

      Recently I tried to write a cost model for an optimisation procedure which would estimate the cost of a given power plant design. It turns out, this is incredibly difficult to do because of all the uncertainties involved between material costs, supply chain, unknown physics, low technology readiness levels, all projected on the scale of decades.

      Once you propagate them all through, the estimate would have such huge error bars that it’s hardly worth including in the procedure, so we put it on the backburner for now and focused on metrics that are more readily quantifiable. Still, it’s a challenging problem that needs to be addressed when designing novel and untested technologies.

    • Photo: CIARA HURLEY

      CIARA HURLEY answered on 21 Nov 2025:

      This is such a good question, especially because I feel like what I found hard a year ago isn’t hard anymore. It turns out this happens a lot in your life because you’re always learning. Think about when you first started something at school and it felt difficult, and now you can do it no problem – it’s just like that. At the moment I’m working on more sustainable energy production, focusing on hydrogen. It’s really difficult to find something that is renewable/green and also cost effective. So right now this challenge is very difficult but I know that we are showing promising signs of scientific improvement and in a few years time we’ll be onto the next difficult challenge!

    • Photo: Emily Walls

      Emily Walls answered on 24 Nov 2025:

      I think one of my hardest problems I worked on was my masters project. It was my first time doing proper independant research and the results were not very good since I didn’t have a lot of data to work with! So that was difficult but good to reflect on where I could have done better and what I would change next time.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 9 Dec 2025:

      Usually answering questions like ‘Why is this no longer communicating?’ or ‘Why did it decide to not work that one time?’. Customers tend not to like the solution of ‘lets keep using it to see if it happens again’ until we can prove it was nothing else.
      The main thing to learn from hard questions is to be willing to admit you don’t know the answer or you need help/time to work it out. Most people will be understanding and will have been in a similar situation.

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