My name's Pete Stevens and as you can see I'm probably
a bit older than the average MSc student.
I did my first degree back in the early nineties in software engineering
at UMIST in Manchester. Since then I've been in
the IT business for a good fifteen or sixteen years,
working for a lot of the large consultancy firms.
I've been involved in setting up incubator companies for British Telecom.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it
I lost my job last year as the head of technology for a small
niche management consultancy. So I felt, well, rather than
go back looking for a new job and competing with new people
there was a number of things I wanted to teach myself
in technology because my skills had got a bit old,
because as you'll appreciate technology's moved on
considerably since the early nineties. So I enrolled on the
MSc Informatics.
I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive about being a mature student
because I wonder how many brain cells I've lost since
I did my first degree in the nineties, but I've fitted in
very, very well actually, and we all get on quite well.
I don't feel like a mature student, as opposed to my other colleagues.
And I've made quite a few friends as well, through playing
football and going out for a beer after college with some of these guys.
It's been very good.
When I did my degree back in the nineties, we didn't have
this level of technology. In fact, I think I'd only just come
across the internet at that particular stage, and everything
was green screen. The facilities are a system called Blackboard
which you can get access to all the notes for the lectures,
you can submit your assignments online, and many, many other
resources. That's very useful, so you can work 24/7 if you have to
to get an assignment in, and I have done at the last
minute as usual. The library facilities are excellent
because you can do a lot of online research because
there's a lot of electronic books online, and journals.
One of the things that I was surprised about, coming to
Kingston University, was the amount of extra curricula stuff
that is useful vocationally. They'll certainly put a lot of
effort in to try to find a job for you, try to help you with CV
writing, in fact I've made use of that CV writing,
where I've had my CV reviewed and suggestions made
about how to improve it.
The other thing that was useful because of my interest
in web entrepreneurship, is that there is an out-of-hours
entrepreneurship group which meets quite regularly
and they get in people from industry to come and speak about
their experiences, and I found that quite useful just to
listen to these guys. I mean I've heard some of this stuff before
but occasionally you pick up new nuggets, but most importantly
is the ability to network with people with the same interests
and who they network with, so that's been very, very useful.
All the modules I've done they've bought in people from industry
and it's not just been people from a training company
but these have been the people who have literally
driven that part of the industry. For example,
Agile development. I mean they could have got someone in
from a training company to do that but they didn't,
they actually got the people who actually formed
the original Agile concept, I mean these are the people
that come up with the ideas. We did something on IT entrepreneurship
and we actually had one of the senior guys from Google
come in and talk to us about IT entrepreneurship which for me
was exceptionally useful to see somebody talk about the future
of where the web's going. We had another chap who was the
founder of something called 'grid computing' from the
Oxford Rutherford Labs come in and tell us the future
of where IT's coming. All this stuff I found exceptionally useful.
I've even spoken to some of my colleagues who are still in industry
about this and they've been very interested in getting hold of
some of the information in some of those lectures, so it's
been extremely useful for me.
My advice about people coming to Kingston, certainly people in my
shoes who are a little bit older, I was very apprehensive
and I've fitted in extremely well, and I've coped extremely well with the assignments,
and it's stretched me and it's got me interested again
in my profession. My advice in general to everyone else
is try and treat it a bit like a job - it's a nine to five job, it's certainly a bit different
to the environment in my first degree with the way they've created
this modular course. You know, you've got to come in nine to five
and then work very hard to some very strict timescales
to deliver. But I think if you can do that, you can pass.