Ilona

Ilona

My name is Ilona and I am a retired computer scientist. When I was young there were no personal computers but there were computers called Main Frames and I knew they were an interesting new invention.

I married quite young and had children straight away. I was trying to finish my degree and I got used to the idea of studying at night when the house was asleep. My husband was also a student at the time. When he got his first job at Edinburgh University, I found out that it was possible for members of staff families to take part in courses offered by the university. They were offering courses in Fortran programming and I thought it would be quite a challenge to see how that worked. The children went to a nursery every day at the time of the class so it was all working out well.

Discovering that programming was like problem solving in a weird and wonderful way, I found it stimulating. I could not stop talking about it.
This is why a few weeks later, at a dinner party with university friends, I happened to mention my programming course and how much I enjoyed it. People were interested but no more – it was just another subject of conversation.

A few weeks later I get a phone call from this guy I was sitting next to at the dinner who says that he might have a job for me. I was flabbergasted that he could think that after a month or so at programming I would be employable! Don’t worry, he said, I have written the program. You just need to run it. OK, I said. I’ll try.

And the rest is history, so to speak. I tried running the program. It did not quite work as he said it would. I had to rewrite it using a completely different language to the one I had learnt on the course. A year on, the department of Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh offered me a job and I
carried on in Computer Science in one guise or another until now.

The moral, if any, to this is that it’s never too early or too late to learn something new. And to enjoy it!