Kenny Campbell Dot Com

Imperial College And The Univesity Of London

In the months leading up to the final exams for my degree, I applied for a course at London's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. The course was entitled "Foundations of Advanced Information Technology", and known as FAIT (as in "a compli"; or ill-). To my delight, I was accepted, and managed to secure funding from the Science and Engineering Research Council. Off to London I went. The first half of the course was quite tough for me, although the second was much easier, since it was assessed on the basis of a written piece of work, and I was quite accustomed to writing essays. After 12 months there, I was awarded the Diploma of Imperial College (DIC - I ask you!) and an MSc from the University of London. I still keep in touch with a couple of folks from those days, too - Richie, Hani, Olivier to name but a three.

One of the nice things about being at IC, apart from it being next door to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum (it shares a boiler with all of these institutions), and a short walk from the Brompton Oratory and Harrods, is that the graduation ceremony takes place in The Royal Albert Hall. I think the boiler is shared with that, too. When I finished at Imperial College, I lurked around the place for a few months, mainly to use the computing facilities. I also spent a lot of time in the careers office, where a lovely fellow Scot took me under her wing and helped prepare me for interviews.

However, when I came screaming into the world at some ungodly hour of the morning, such interviews lay far in the future.

My career began in the first few days of 1994. And actually, I was born at a very civilised hour of three o'clock in the afternoon after a labour which lasted a mere 6 minutes and 35 seconds, and finished with a distinctive "pop".