Question: do you like your job?

Conor McGinn answered on 27 Feb 2016:

Yea, I absolutely love most of it. I love that I get to work on research that I think up myself. Most engineers work for companies and don’t have much control over what they actually work on. If I have an idea, I have the freedom to devote lots of time to develop the idea and take it to the next level. I have alot of freedom with my job. For the most part I can work whatever hours I like, whether from home or not and I don’t officially have to meet a dress code. I get to work with really smart, passionate people and I get to travel the world (I’m writing this response from Brazil!). Also I work on designing robots – thats cool and really interesting to me. I am excited by what the future holds for me and my work. I’m excited by the prospect of helping create a new industry that will help people, and doing it all in Ireland.

There are one or two few things about my job that I don’t like and/or frustrate me. Funding is probably the biggest issue. It costs money to do the work I do – either to pay for the parts of the robots or to pay the people to design/make/program them. Funding to universities and research is a fraction of what it should be. The government and big companies in Ireland need to do so much more to support what we do. In particular we need to support early stage research like mine. It drives me crazy that more funding isn’t made easily accessible to support my research. Starting out in a new research area (robotics is very new field) in this climate is a very difficult thing to do. Without much of a track record, its hard to be competitive against research teams that might be doing less ambitious research, but have been around longer. However what people need to realise is that robotics is the field of the future – robots will soon be as big as the internet. And we are one of the few teams in the country really working in the area. Unless groups like ours get appropriately funded and resourced, Ireland will never be competitive, let alone a world leader in this field.
And often the criteria that is required to get funding is hugely flawed. We had a student last year who scored the #1 grade in his final exams (in Trinity, the #1 University in the country according to the rankings) – the guy is a genius – yet based on an application form he was refused funding to do a PhD. I’m going to stop rambling here… You get the idea.