Question: How would you compare your initial expectations of going into the job, and The workplace you’re immersed in now ?

Moving from university to industry was something of a shock to start with. At Uni, Industry was painted as as the golden land of huge opportunity and endless resource…..not a bit of it, every penny is counted, every cost and benefit weighed against each other. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.

Then there was the scale – moving from milligrams in glass tubes to kilos, tens of kilos, hundreds of kilos in metal or plastic buckets, cauldrons and tanks; it was hard to see it as chemistry at all. It took time to realise that, though we wore overalls, bump caps and boots not labcoats, the same chemistry is occuring, now with added complications of physics and engineering- energy imputs from all angles, diffussion and disolution rates and all manner of additional factors we never had to consider on the small scale. So many more additional skills. Not having a well-stocked library (we did have one, mostly stocked with 10yr old copies of the Yellow Pages for every part of the country), making do with the scraps of knowledge not locked away behind publisher paywalls. Learning to work pragmatically, learning how to design and analyse experiments efficiently (factorial is not the only way). Thinking about design space. Learning about metrology, statistical control, variation and repeatability to an extent we’d never considered in our experiments before. Learning, essentially, that our hard-won chemistry knowledge was almost valueless – it was the learning how to be a chemist that was most valuable at uni.

After 20 years, the hardest lesson has been that the knowledge I’ve acquired is now more useful and more valuable to others than the knowledge I could acquire myself. Accepting that aiding, guiding, planning and helping tmy colleagues is more useful than being in the lab myself. I always saw myself as a lab chemist, not a desk jockey, it’s a fight to try to remain so. The thrill of understanding, of problem solving remains the same.