Greetings, inveterate blog-readers. If you’ve found your way to my blog, you clearly have too much time on your hands. I’ve never blogged before (and thus neither my blogging fame nor infamy have compelled you to follow me here), and I’m not a famous scientist (I’ve only just started the second year of my postdoc), so I can think of no good reason why you should be interested in anything I have to say. Nevertheless, I hope you find some value – abiding if you’re lucky, but more likely fleeting – in the entries I’ll be writing.

And what, I hear you ask, will be the topic of these entries? Well, I’m soon going to be leaving science research. It took only a year as a postdoc to confirm that bench science simply isn’t for me. Not that I have ever done bench science in the strict sense of the term – my doctoral and postdoc research has mostly entailed sitting at a desk, using mathematical equations and an expensive computer to simulate physiological reality – but regardless, I can’t do this forever. To be perfectly honest, I seem to have lost a little of what I thought was my inextinguishable curiosity about the mechanics of the natural world. In addition, the fact that science is increasingly competitive doesn’t make it particularly appealing as a long-term career choice.

So I’m on my way out, but my final departure from the lab won’t be for another 6-12 months, as there are such practical matters as deciding what to do next that I need to attend to first. My plan is therefore to use this blog to record some of my thoughts between now and then. And although I’ve been told by the powers that be that these blog entries should be science-oriented, my potential foray into employment territory outside science may require some discussion of topics whose connection to science is tangential at best.

(For those who are interested, Corie suggested that I include a link to the journal entries that I wrote for Nature over the past year. These chronicle some of the ups and downs of my first year as a postdoc.)