Yesterday I received some lovely feedback following my Star Wars themed newsletter. A few people mentioned they’d enjoyed reading the personal part at the beginning.
I often begin newsletters with some memories, or general thoughts, before commencing the main topic. This hopefully sets the mood and provides some context in which to read the remainder. So, given that it’s something I often do, it was nice to hear that people liked it.
As a reminder my Gold Card special is always available here:
https://nickrockel.substack.com/goldcard
That will give you 20% off an annual or monthly subscription and you're also most welcome to use it if you're on a low wage or you're studying.
Suffice to say it has encouraged me to do the same today. The year was 1993...
Maria and I had gotten married, bought a house, and had two children. Although not in that traditional order. Life was good but I wasn’t really going anywhere. My band was going ok playing every week, often two or three times from Thursday to Saturday. But I had a nagging doubt that I needed to do something else.
I could see that playing in bands wasn’t going to provide for my young family in the way that I would need it to. It had been great fun for a few years but I also felt as though I needed something a bit more intellectually stimulating.
As a tentative first step over that year of 1993 I did a couple of Uni papers extramurally through Massey University, Medieval Europe and Medieval England. In those days I was far more interested in History than Politics.
At the end of the year the guitarist and the drummer didn’t want to keep playing with the vocalist. Phil at 27 was quite a few years older than us, he liked different music and he wasn’t so interested in hanging around with the rest of us drinking and playing pool, preferring to disappear after shows to the company of, others, returning for the next one.
Although I felt similarly it was still a shock. When I’d started the band in 1990 Phil had been the first person I’d recruited and he and I wrote the original material we performed alongside the pub covers of the day. We tried a few vocalists out and settled on a guy who I started writing songs with but my heart wasn’t in it. It was time for something new.
One day towards the end of that year Maria dropped me at the bus terminal and I took a ride to the big smoke. I got off at the old railway station and walked up to the hill to Auckland Uni to enrol. Goodbye rock stardom, I was off to be an accountant.
Except I didn’t, I ran into my cousin Brendon in the queues and had a chat with him. He was coming back for this second year of Computer Science and we got to talking, by the end of the day I’d applied to do a BSc majoring in Comp Sci.
It wasn’t a formality though. I’d dropped out of school a term into the seventh form to be something that wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant, so I didn’t gain entry based on my school exams. I was still under 25 so didn’t qualify as an adult student. Fortunately I’d done ok on those History papers through Massey so they let me in.
Whereas at the end of High School I’d had a gutsful of learning institutions, having spent a few years mostly spent hanging around public bars, band rehearsal rooms, or looking after toddlers, University was a revelation to me. I loved it.
Interesting people, lots of things happening, it felt like a world of interesting opportunities was available. Towards the middle of the year I decided that maybe I wanted something more challenging and decided to add a commerce conjoint, which enabled you to complete two degrees in four years, for me a BSc/BCom.
Coming in half way through the year was a bit awkward as I hadn’t done the first half. For example first year economics is divided into two papers, micro economics and macro economics, with the former being a prerequisite for the latter. I went and talked to the lecturer to try and convince him to let me in without having done it.
To my surprise he agreed, saying I was big enough to take responsibility and it was my problem if it didn’t work out. I ended up getting an A+ on the paper, despite not having done the course that it was supposed to build on.
Over the summer at the end of that first year I thought a lot about what to focus on. My best grades were in things like Economics and Statistics and yet I was mostly studying Computer Science and Mathematics.
My summer job was processing student loans and allowances at the Auckland College of Education. An appointment based on nepotism, my mother was a lecturer there in Early Childhood, but I didn’t feel too bad about, it turned out that most of us working there over the summer were related to somebody that worked there.
I got to know a guy who had finished an economics degree and talked with him about the career options. Long story short-ish I decided a career in Wellington with a postgraduate degree didn’t really sound that appealing, not compared to the opportunities available in IT, so I abandoned the commerce and focussed on the Bsc.
Right about now you might be thinking - look Nick we said we liked a bit of an anecdote to start things off but seriously dude, you’re nearly 1,000 words in, do you think it might be time to start with the topic at hand?
Yes, we’re coming to that, although not today as you’ll soon discover…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Nick's Kōrero to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.