How I Got Into Computing

Following Wendy Tan White's blog post and the suggestion by Hannah Dee that BCSWomen should follow suit and share their stories I thought I'd write how I got into computing.

Maths and science were always my favourite subjects at school and, having grown up with an engineer father, decided that I'd like to follow suit. I had my one and only encounter with a careers advisor just before I started A levels. When I said that I was thinking of doing engineering he suggested that pharmacy would be a good idea - at that point I gave up on careers advisors! When I was taking A levels ( maths, chemistry and physics ) I was really interested in the small amount that we did about atomic physics and thought I'd like to do nuclear engineering. On investigation I found that there were only two universities running this course but that I could also do a mechanical engineering degree with a nuclear option. I applied for sponsorships and was given one by National Nuclear Corporation ( whether I'd choose that option now is another matter!) and spent a year doing workshop training and working on site for the year before I went to Nottingham to do my mechanical engineering degree.

I met a computer for the first time in the first year of my degree - Fortran IV on a mainframe. In the second year it was basic on Commodore PETs and by the third year I decided to take a double software engineering course and discovered the joys of PDP11 assembler.

I returned to NNC to complete my graduate training but as the year progressed I knew that this wasn't what I wanted to continue doing. When I received a letter from the previous year's software engineering lecturer asking if I was interested in returning to do a PhD I jumped at the chance. During three years of designing and building a filament winding machine including all the mechanical, hardware and software I realised that software was the thing that made me tick.

From there I moved to the Computer Science department at Nottingham University working in the drawing recognition research group but employed by CadCam Technology. I think at that point I knew that I wouldn't work as a mechanical engineer again. I still love writing software and my current job developing systems for reading travel documents is always interesting and challenging.