It is easy to look back and see those little (and sometimes not so little) moments that have caused great changes in your life. Being in academia (and having survived this far) means that I have been immensely lucky. There is no other way to describe it. Some of that luck has been self-made, or at least I have seen and taken opportunities when they presented themselves. However, there were a lot of cases where I benefitted from sheer serendipity. I thought it might be useful to highlight some of those:

1. I was born this way – Straight off I need to acknowledge my privilege. I’m white and male (among other awesome things) and that gives me a massive headstart straight away.
2. A casual conversation with a lecturer – After an ecology lecture in 2004 I approached my lecturer and asked about PhDs. In my mind, he asked “How do you feel about dragonflies?” although I have a feeling I have made that up. He wrote a PhD project up, I applied, and started working with him the next year.
3. A transoceanic link – My PhD supervisor happened to have a former student working at a university in Canada. He put me in touch, we found a slightly unusual funding source, and I ended up moving over shortly after finishing my PhD.
4. Helping out around the lab – As the senior postdoc in the lab in Canada, I chipped-in with supervision of MSc and PhD students. The upshot was that I was helping a student analyse and write-up her data. That analysis produced a Nature paper.
5. Government policy on research assessment – Because I hadn’t held a faculty position before, if I joined a UK university and was a part of their Research Excellence Framework submission I would only have to submit one paper. The fact that I was looking for a faculty position just as our Nature paper came out made me very attractive as a new hire.
6. Having a big mouth – Someone in the department realised that I never say “no” to anything. One day I was called into my Head of School’s office and shown an email from Random House publishers saying that the chair of a local event had pulled out and could they suggest someone to fill in. The event was an Evening With Richard Dawkins (of whom I am a massive fan) in front of a sell-out crowd at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I said yes (inevitably), met Richard, we shared a couple of hours on stage, and I have been told that the evening went extremely well (it was hard to tell from under the spotlight!).

That’s not saying that I haven’t worked hard. I’ve done what most academics do, which is to sacrifice a degree of work-life balance until reaching a permanent position. I have published a LOT and the ideas that I have been nurturing for a number of years (urban pond research networks, projects on environmental education, pedagogical research, and dragonfly evolution) are coming to fruition. However, there were key points in my career when luck was a deciding factor. There are probably academics out there who had no luck and got to where they are purely on the basis of hard work. However, I imagine they are in the minority!