Do you feel more intelligent because your a scientist?

Question: Do you feel more intelligent because your a scientist?
- Keywords:
  classic,
  intelligence
Asked by anon-270539 on 18 Nov 2020.
- Kirsty Lindsay answered on 18 Nov 2020:
  
  No- I feel like I know less now, or at least I know I don’t know a lot of things now!
  
  Science is like other jobs- some people are really clever, some people are just average, we aren’t all geniuses. For example, I still can’t spell and need a special spell checker on my computer to make sure I’m typing correctly.
- Joanna Giles answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  🤣 nope… people always think I’ll be good help in a quiz, but I’m not at all 🙈 I might good at science, but there is a lot that I don’t understand.
- Christopher Marriott answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  Definitely not! I’m quite good at my specific branch of science (better than my friends who haven’t studied it for a long time), but I still need help sometimes. I think the longer you study or do something, the better you tend to get at it, so when you see scientists on TV that seem really really clever you have to remember that they have been doing their job and studying for a long time to get to the stage that they are at now.
- Matthew Kelbrick answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  No – The more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know.
  In science you have to be comfortable walking the line between the known and the unknown. We use our current knowledge of a topic to allow us to ask new questions and find new knowledge, but when you find this new knowledge you realise that there are now hundreds of more questions which you don’t know the answer to – but that’s OK! Its impossible for one person to know everything, so that’s why we team up with other scientists to learn more step by step.
- Gemma Chew answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  No! Whenever I tell people I’m a scientist they always say “you must be very clever”.
  But like the others have said the more you learn the more you realise you don’t know.
  Also even though I am a Chemist, my knowledge is mostly organic chemistry, which is one small part of chemistry.
- Nadia Terrazzini answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  Definitely not! Being a scientist makes you actually realize how little you know and how much more there is to understand. That realization makes you want to learn more about your subject. So I just know a bit more than others in a limited area of science. I am really terrible at quizzes unless they have immunology questions (which is never!).
- Joanna Furnival-Adams answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  Not really – I think it’s a common misconception that scientists are more intelligent than non-scientists.
  
  Intelligence can appear in different ways; for example, I have non-scientist friends who are very emotionally intelligent who are able to read people’s emotions and instantly make connections with lots of different people. I have other friends who are able to manage very complex tasks and organise their work in a really efficient way and I think this is a sign of intelligence.
  
  I might be intelligent in terms of processing information in a logical way and making sense of observations, but I don’t think that means I’m more intelligent than non-scientists!
- Estela Gonzalez Fernandez answered on 19 Nov 2020:
  
  Nope!. Actually, I think there’s so much to learn, so many different areas I don’t know about! Scientists are often specialists in one or a few things, in my case vectors and pathogens transmitted by them, but I know very little about cancer, for example…
- Nooshin Ghavami answered on 20 Nov 2020:
  
  I think whatever field you work in, as long as you can do a good job and put in hard work then you should feel proud of yourself and know that you’re smart. For some people science seem hard and they might see me as intelligent because I work in the field, but I’ve always just found it super fun!
- Ben Lewis answered on 20 Nov 2020:
  
  This is an excellent question. A lot of scientists are held up as being particularly intelligent – and many are! I think it’s important to remember there are lots of different ways to be intelligent, though, and that whilst a number of scientists can be strong in some ways, they can also be weaker in others. There’s a lot of very successful people I know who wouldn’t have been considered the “smartest” at school. At university, I was completely average at exams, but when it came to doing research it suited me really well! There’s room for all kinds of people in science – those different strengths enable us to do more as teams.
- Duncan Sleeman answered on 21 Nov 2020:
  
  Nope definitely not. In fact I think Albert Einstein described it best ‘The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know’.
  
  As others have said here, when you explain to people that you’re a scientist the standard response is ‘oh you must be really clever’. The truth in my particular case is that academia didn’t come easy to me, I really had to work at it. However, I love what I do and learn more everyday. I know lots about Cardiology and of course how the heart works. However, if you put me into a genomics laboratory I would have no idea what was going on!!!
- Stephanie Longet answered on 21 Nov 2020:
  
  Oooh no… There are so many things I don’t know and I will never know !
- Samantha Watson answered on 24 Nov 2020:
  
  oh no! In fact, because I work with some truly amazing people I often feel really stupid and inadequate. But then I see or do something that reminds me I’m OK, and it’s fine that there are lots of things I don’t understand as well as others, because there are other bits that I really do,

Question: Do you feel more intelligent because your a scientist?

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