A bit of luck and a bit of hard work. I am still not quite sure why the Cambridge particle physics group took me on as a PhD student — maybe they saw somehow that I was a better researcher than exam-taker. And I’m not that bad at exams, but I had a lot of climbing and other stuff to keep me busy at uni, so my mind was not fully on my subject until the last year or so: I partially regret that, but also had a good time. Anyway, my PhD went pretty well but I wanted to change topic, and lucked out that a theorist I knew was looking for a computational physics expert, which fit me pretty well. So I did that for a while and grew myself back into doing a mix of experiment and theory. It could have gone wrong at many points, and I wasn’t particularly career-minded, but somehow it worked out and here I am!
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