I was the first person in my family ever to go to university, and hence I had no template to work with. I didn't really do it right and it could have gone better, but really I was a bit too young to cope in a mature fashion with the change of lifestyle. l came from a very poor family and at university I was surrounded by many people of privilege. It took a few years for me to realise that what other people thought of me didn'matter as I deserved to be there, but that feeling of inferiority has never really left me.
I discovered in secondary school that I was good at physics. This was somewhat of a surprise as I had always planned to go to art college. It was also a surprise for the smartest kid in the school who was mocked because some kid with absolutely nothing special to make him stand out was suddenly scoring more highly than him. So physics was my topic, and actually it was my only science. With that direction established I went as far as I could go, getting degrees and a PhD, and I loved it, it defined me - it still does. I had a couple of spells as a postdoc and then decided that I could no longer live with the insecurity of one year contracts, especially as I had a wife to consider, so I took a permanent job in the defence industry. So far I have been out of academia for 15 years.
In 2009 I took voluntary redundancy and did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to be doing with my life. The answer was research, because I thought I had something useful to offer, this was certainly the conclusion I came to when I looked back on the variety of topics that I had been involved with. I took another industrial research position but this time I had thought to build academic connections and perhaps get some ideas into academia. since then I have been trying to develop some of my creativity. Its not as easy as I would have liked.
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