Where did my degree go? November 3, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , trackbackAbout twenty years ago, I somehow managed to get a degree in maths. I was slightly surprised at the time, and can only assume my tutors had drunk even more than I. It’s not even a particularly bad degree, though well and truly propped up by a computer science minor. I’ve never really used it, but always assumed that, like schoolgirl French or bicycle riding, it would return if I ever happened to need it.
Today I found myself sitting in Blackwells bookshop looking at a differential equation and very concerned to realise that it meant almost nothing to me. You may well ask why I didn’t just find another book, and that’s a good question. I’ve enrolled in a course about wind power, at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, and they say the absolute minimum prerequisite is A level maths and physics, which I blithely told them that would be fine.
This is one of my regular forays into finding a better way of earning a living than corporate IT project management, and my idea of how to save the planet from impending climate doom. I suspect its going to be a long, dark winter. I bought the book. I refuse to get a bicycle.
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I’m glad I have company. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering in ’79, which required a lot of math background. Seems that everything after algebra has dissipated into the years.