Hi Rachele,
One of the nice things about working as a research scientist at a university is that your schedule can be flexible. Sometimes I do work extra long days - just last week I was at work until 8 pm on one day, and I worked both days over the weekend because of some upcoming deadlines. However, this means that sometimes I can also have a short day to take care of personal business. Every day at work is usually different, but there are certain types of tasks that I often do at work. Some examples of things I might do on a typical day are testing or simulating spaceflight hardware, searching for journal articles on my university's library web site, reading journal articles, downloading and analyzing satellite data, writing computer code in IDL to analyze satellite data, writing and submitting journal articles on the results of data analysis, responding to peer reviewers of my journal articles, writing NASA grant proposals, reviewing other scientists' journal articles, reviewing NASA proposals, and outreach (like Solar Week!). Of course I don't do all of these things every single day. Which of these tasks I work on depends on the current stage of each of my projects. Some of these things can take several days or even months to complete, so I do a little bit of work on different tasks every day.
Kris