Academic Researcher

You investigate questions no one has answered yet, then share what you find with the wider world. Day to day that means reading deeply in your field, designing studies or experiments, gathering and analyzing data, and writing papers for peer-reviewed journals. Depending on your discipline you might work in a lab, an archive, the field, or in front of a computer running models. Most researchers are based at universities or research institutes, where they also mentor students, apply for grants, and present findings at conferences alongside other scholars.