 Hi there, I'm joined by Michael McTig, who has previously studied at the Australian National University. Michael studied a Bachelor of Philosophy in Science and had majors in Chemistry and Mathematics and completed honours in Chemistry. Thanks Michael for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That's great, so let's start off by learning a little bit about you. Can you share with us what you're currently doing with your time after your completed study? Yeah, sure. So I graduated from A&E last year, like you said, and I'm currently employed at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, or ARHW, as a statistician and data analyst in the graduate programme. So for anyone who hasn't heard of ARHW, which includes me last year, I like to think of it as kind of like the ABS, but for health statistics. So we analyse data from a wide range of sources, such as like Medicare and stuff like that. And then we pull it all together and put out reports on how diseases and different health outcomes are affecting Australians and different groups of Australians. So this year has actually been sort of good for business in terms of bushfires and pandemics, so lots of work for us. Definitely a whole lot of data that you've been able to analyse and work. I will take a step back towards the beginning of your studies and understand what made you decide to tackle a science degree, and potentially in particular the Bachelor of Philosophy in Science here at the A&E. I've always really appreciated and enjoyed the evidence-based approach to tackling problems. So starting out by working out what you know or what you assume that you know, and then how you can logically deduce different things from that and some quite unexpected things sometimes that might surprise you. And I guess sort of on the flip side to that, I also enjoyed testing out those assumptions, you know, are these things actually true? How do we know they're true? Really probing down into that. And things tend to get a lot more messy and complicated than they might appear. Also just find science really fun. Like you get to look at different things from planets to atoms, and it's just really fascinating finding out how the universe works. You mentioned there about complex systems, and I'd like to pull a little bit more on that. So science is based around dealing with complex problems and theories. What has been your experience during your studies in terms of working within that space? Well, I guess coming out of high school, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how things worked in science. But what I found as I sort of progressed to uni is that, like I was saying, things turned out to be a bit more complicated than we think. So maybe in high school, chemistry early in high school, you learn that electrons go around atoms in rings. And then maybe in college or in first year, you sort of get, oh, no, it's a bit more complicated. They have different shaped things they go around in. And then you get further. It's like all the probability of being here and it all just gets a lot more messier and complicated. You know, as you're learning that you're sort of following the history and evolution of science. You know, we come up with a model or a theory that works well enough and can explain what we need it to might work really well for a time. But then we come across something that we can't quite explain with that model or it has problems like it predicts something that we can't see or we don't observe. And so we have to really dig a bit deeper and like, oh, is this thing we're thinking is true? Is that actually true? And that reveals us to a better understanding of the universe, even if it is a potentially messier, more complicated one than we'd like to think. The final question I've got for you is around a cross-disciplinary approach to science. How do you feel that science is a cross-disciplinary approach to bringing in all those different aspects? I guess when I started at uni, I knew I kind of liked science, but I wasn't sure which part of science. You know, I enjoyed maths and chemistry, but also physics and computer science. And so doing my degree there, I knew I could sort of explore those different options and wasn't bundled into any particular one. You can't cleanly separate, you know, where does chemistry end and physics begin and where does that end and maths start? They all interweave and stuff. So the area I ended up going into is computational quantum chemistry. And that pulls from all those fields I really enjoyed. So you can use your mathematical knowledge to apply models similar to physics to explain how chemicals react and you use computers to model that because it's too hard to do by hand. One other good thing I found going through uni is that having friends doing different parts of science. So I had some friends who were really into that maths. And if I encountered a problem in my chemistry project, they'd be like, oh, that's similar to this problem I had over here. And you wouldn't think that chemistry and maths would have much in common, but it turns out there's a bit under the surface that, you know, they're not that different. Sounds like you had a very interesting journey through your studies and also as you've started your working postgraduate life. So thank you, Michael, for sharing this journey with us. No worries. Thank you very much for having me on.