Probably the most important highlight of my life was graduating from Cambridge University in the summer of '96 as a mature student...

The full horror of the 60 surplus pounds I gained while at university can be seen , as well as the ritual rabbit(!), in my graduation photos. Tis a truth universally acknowledged that three years of hard labour 'reading' Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge can only be accomplished with the aid of a quantity of chocolate numerically equal in pounds annually to the total number of undergraduates in one's college.
Or perhaps the chocolate was needed to keep up my energy as I combined being on the college graduate society's exec with the LesBiGay organising, & the odd 'extra' such as production of Varsity, the university weekly newspaper. 
My time at university wasn't all spent reliving my wild youth... I gained a scholarship in my second year when traditionally you're expected to slacken off in every area except rowing... And, yes, I came out of Cambridge with my love and enthusiasm for the social sciences undiminished... thanks to some of the best people in the field. By far the greatest inspiration was Anthony Giddens: from the very first lecture right through to the joy of Wednesday afternoon seminars in my third year, I can put my hand on my heart when I say that guy never failed to deliver. He was, for me, the embodiment of everything which makes Cambridge the best university in the UK.

Beyond Anthony Giddens? We have what might, given one of my other enthusiasms, I might be forgiven for refering to as The Next Generation. John Thompson and Graham McCann were the greatest influences on the intellectual side. Brendan Burchill and Graham McCann were the best teachers, both giving unstintingly of their time. Linda McDowell, Sue Benson, Raymond Geuss and David Good should also be 'mentioned in dispatches'. As should Suzanne Cohen , my friend and supervision partner for the three years.

To Brendan in particular I owe the training in research skills which I now use in my working life, as well as the awakening of a love of statistics. Some people regard this as a strange trait, bordering on insanity! His allowing me to devise and carry out a piece of research in a commercial environment on one of the first trials of interactive TV in the world was a risk for both of us which paid off in that it gained me my scholarship. No research deadline since has been quite as tight. When I read the idiocities being written about interactive television now by academics who have zero grasp of its technical aspects or the global potentail for its use, I'm doubly grateful for the chance to be carrying out research during its development.

My two main areas of research while at Cambridge were on the effect of Interactive TV on users' perception of the news [Online Media, a division of Acorn Computer kindly allowed me to carry out the field work on the volunteers trialling their ground breaking iTV hardware], and a dissertation on - Evolving Identities:lesbianism from silent subculture to abseiling avengers. The first was a far more successful reflection of where my skills and talents lie than the second - but sometimes we have to find out the hard way that you can't always condense down your whole being and essence into 10,000 words and include enough Foucault to satisfy your examiners too!
Thus, had I ever seriously thought about a career in Lesbian Studies, I saw that it's on a path whose gate I'm not yet ready to leap over... or at least not whilst trying to combine it with living with a heterosexual partner, and running a consultancy.... Forced back to technology-as-career, rather than technology-as-passion, some of my current research interests are on my company website. Mind you, on a good week, the two aren't so far apart! Yes, folks, sociology, technology and gender studies can frequently be combined... and I continue to maintain links with Cambridge University partly in connection with the Gender Studies Working Group.

Getting to Cambridge at all - especially with an unconditional offer of a place at Newnham College, wasn't something I could have imagined myself doing. I'd once dreamt of going to Essex - well, it was THE place for social science in the 70s - but Cambridge? It was a meeting with Dr Helena Shire while I was at Bedford College in '83 which set my feet on the path.She supervised my partner while he was at Cambridge ten years earlier, and we were visiting her one weekend: it says a lot for her as a person that she didn't mind an old student turning up on her doorstep with his partner in tow. I can't even remember what she and I were talking about, other than her book which was on my reading list. Except that I'd just had my exam results, and had come top of my year in Sociology, a subject I barely knew existed before starting the course, as well as second in the year in both my subsidiary subjects. She told me I should apply for Cambridge...

She was right. I hope that she's now up there with the rest of the guardian angels!