Little me
I was born and brought up in South London. My parents had me privately educated whilst living on a council estate. The primary school, Putney Park, was excellent but my secondary school, Emanuel, did me less good
My A'Level results were poor, but I scrapped into Thames Poly (now University of Greenwich) and completed a degree in International Marketing. The year in Hamburg was the highlight ... and the social life. I had the good fortune to meet some wonderful people.
From there I went into sales for a short while, but quickly moved into mathematical modeling. Normal people hate statistics, but I was - and still am - fascinated by the way cause and effect can be measured. Only the bright kids were allowed to do "proper" mathematics at A'Level so I decided to play with sums at the OU.
By then I was married with two lovely daughters so I moved into teaching at an FE college. I was taken on to teach maths, but soon migrated to programming when they found out I had programmed the mathematical models on which I had worked. The idea was to teach for a few years until I grew up enough to decide what I wanted to do. 34 years later I retired from the same college at which I had started.
The college has wanted me to take an MSc so I contacted a a former tutor of mine who had risen to the Dean of Computing. She took me on and is now one of my supervisors for my PhD.
This leaves me some spare time to play with my three grandchildren. They are great fun.
Work experience
- Bank Clerk over the summer
- Customer services in a boat hire company on the Thames.
- Research statistician for an oil company in Hamburg
- Office organiser for an engineering company in The Hague.
- International salesman for a military equipment supplier.
- Statistical researcher for the Construction Industry Training Board.
- Statistician and parliamentary candidate for one of the major political parties.
- Lecturer and manager at Lewisham College (now Lesotho).
- Visiting lecturer and research student at the University of Greenwich.
- Co-owner of the O-VL and EduLevel websites for e-learning.
Virtual Real Estate
- O-VL
- EduLevel
- Blog: andywicksblog.wordpress.com
- YouTube Channel: Edulevel
- Skype: wicksandy
- Email address: lord.wicks@gmail.com
- University email address: wa02@gre.ac.uk
"If we knew the answer, it would not be called research." Albert Einstein