Expert Witness Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t even go for a swim unless you left someone up by the towels on the beach because some times even a wet, sandy towel was pinched.
    Having worked with holidaymakers at their worst and then working in England in a soul-destroying job looking after cashpoint machine engineers (it was the job that was soul-destroying, not the engineers), in 1996 I moved to New Zealand. I rang the University of Auckland not long after I arrived. The conversation went some thing like this:
    Me: ‘I have a Masters degree in pollen analysis. Do you have any PhD projects going that I could do?’
    Them: ‘Yes. It has a grant as well. When do you want to start?’
    Unbelievable but true nonetheless. Doing that PhD was the best and worst experience of my life. Never has anything been so draining, with me working 16 hours a day for the last two years because I had to get a job and work full time as well as try to finish it. As anyone will tell you, a half-finished PhD is worse than not having started one at all, so you have to finish it, no matter how difficult it might become because of other circumstances. So I finished it and promptly had two consecutive bouts of flu, which lasted two months.
    Unfortunately, towards the end of my PhD I decided a life in academia was not going to be for me, certainly not at that stage. Some would say that perhaps it would have been useful to know this before I started but them’s the breaks, I guess. I really enjoy research but achieving a permanent, full-timejob as a lecturer is not just about research ability or preparing lectures. It’s about fighting for funding for your projects. Without funding you have no research projects; without research projects you can’t attract postgraduate students and you haven’t got anything to publish. These days, it’s all about how many papers you can publish and how many other researchers cite your papers in their research papers. The advent of the Internet and electronic publishing of research papers means that the number of times your papers are cited in other people’s publications can be tracked electronically. You are then automatically compared with your colleagues, not only in your own department or educational institute but also globally. Talk about pressure.
    During the final years of my PhD I became interested in the application of pollen to solving crime. I attended a one-day course on forensic palynology where I met a man who was to become a colleague, who was also a geology graduate but had retrained in forensic science. He suggested I take the forensic science course at the University of Auckland. It was a total eye-opener. Before then I’d never done anything that felt so right for me, but forensic science was just exactly that. Geology was good and I enjoyed it, but I never saw myself working as a geologist. Forensic science on the other hand, well, it was just so logical and simple. The analytical techniques and the equipment used in forensic science are broadly the same as those used in geology. The basic science was easy to under stand because I’d covered all of it during my years at university. Here, finally, I had found what I wanted to be when I grew up. At the age of 30, I decided I wanted to be a forensic scientist.
    The next step was to get an actual job, which is tough in an industry where jobs are about as common as hen’s teeth. I worked as a consultant in Auckland for a while, which meant I did casework experience without my employer having to commit to employing me full time, then decided I needed to go back to England.
    It wasn’t that I decided England was the best place for me but I had been living in New Zealand for six years by that time. I love living in someone else’s country but it was crunch time. A lot had changed in my life since I’d moved to New Zealand in 1996 and I didn’t know whether I was in New Zealand for the right reasons. I needed to leave because I