My alter-ego “M”scientist was created at a moment of frustration. Many ask what “M” stands for. Well, to be honest I don’t know either. The suggestions could be many, good or bad. Certainly it goes with the psychological mood. I made this blog because I wanted to nag about things. And sure I was nagging for almost everything. That’s what writing a Ph.D. is all about. Reading papers, writing and blaming everything around you but most of all hating your Ph.D. You are sick of it. You don’t want to see or hear or have to do anything that relates even remotely to what you spend the last three/four years of your life working on and studying. And yet… the moment you submit it you bloody miss it. The first day you are like an alcoholic who stayed sober for a day. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You open the document, you read a few lines and then you close it again. You go eat something. Then you sit again in front of the computer and open a couple of graphs that you realised you mislabelled. You change them.

That was the moment I realised I was starting to loose not only a way of life, which at that particular time I so much hated, but the very reason for existence of this persona. I was slowly, day-by-day becoming myself again. I even got a proper job. With worries, stress, problems, meetings, politics, it’s own frustrations but also it’s own pleasures and certainly good times. But now I was a civil servant. I needed to be more careful with what I was nagging about. And somehow “M”scientist became this dormant “old beast” of mine that only existed as the name of my mobile’s Bluetooth connection. Of course, from time to time I would still visit these pages of mine, as a reminder of an old way of living I was now looking back with a sense of nostalgia.

Then, only recently I took a “brave” decision. To move on job-wise, and to indulge to the adventure called “academia”.

I always thought that “M”scientist was an “academic nagging beast” and so it’s only natural that I’ve start feeling like the Incredible Hulk is waking up inside me. And NO… don’t worry… I am not turning green… yet. Don’t think would be appropriate for a post-doc to turn up on his first day at his new job all green, naked chested, with ripped shirt and trousers, smashing doors, chairs and desks all around him.

So I promised myself that I’ll bring him back (yes… I know… I said that before). I also promised to try and write at least some of my blog posts in English, hence this desperate try. I just hope that academia will give the “food for blog” that I was so carefully hiding behind the pile of health and safety forms, memos and bureaucratic lunacy.

Is it a new era for “M”scientist?