How did I find myself here? 

 John Warren, October 2021

I guess the answer to why I am part of the Technician’s Commitment team stems from my journey as to how I got to my current role. Buckle up, this is going to be a long one. 

So for me “science” was my end goal in life even at junior school I gravitated around the practical, technical and science classes and struggled in the “arts and languages” although I loved colours – I still do.  I wanted to be a scientist even before I knew what a scientist really was.  Yes perhaps Buck Rodgers and Star Trek had given me false hopes but rather oddly I watched, possibly like a lot of my generation a large amount of open university content on BBC 2 and the infamous yellow HB pencil pointer science demonstrations and it all was just amazing to see.  I was concerned that I would need a big bushy beard to be a real scientist, but I could live with that. 

Fast forward to University I read Computer Aided Chemistry at UMIST (you may know the place) and got to work with amazing people and I was going to be an academic that was my end goal – no questions asked. 

I got to the end of my PhD and well those academic dreams were still there but now I wanted to be a Crystallographer.  I’d been turned to the darkside by a additive area of science where you make crystals other people make crystals and they bring them to you.  You stick them on a magic machine and it produces a diffraction pattern which looks like a star map, a tiny universe in each crystal then you turn that into a 3D structure.  It is amazing and then you find out that yes you made a new C-C or metal-N bond. Or no the thing drawn on the scrap of paper by the submitter was not what they thought it was at all.  Each crystal was a spin on the roulette table, throw of the dice, turn of the cards in an research gamble. 

Over 200 crystals structures later my PhD was coming to an end and so had my career path changed.  I got such a kick using lab-based equipment what would a Synchrotron be like?  So off I went to work at Daresbury for five and a bit years. 

Then everything changed.  I stuck to the end of Daresbury with the SRS being closed I was made redundant.  I learnt very quickly that politics and promises do not always manifest into career opportunities and spent a period as a visiting academic or you can read as “out of work” dealing with years of Daresbury SMX data and awaiting a formal opportunity at the University of Bath. I got that as a Senior PDRA completed out some of the non-ambient research I’d been developing at Daresbury then moved to Liverpool another Senior PDRA and it was becoming very clear that my career was becoming stuck and what each University allowed a PDRA to do to develop themselves was very different. 

I took another small career break, moved to China and then came back into a role as a Senior Experimental Officer at Manchester.  It was a refreshing change and really felt like I had come back home. 

If after reading this post you have any feedback to provide, please send it to Technician.Commitment@manchester.ac.uk.

If you have any stories or information you would like to contribute to this blog site, please send them to Technician.Commitment@manchester.ac.uk.

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