Pub night with a difference ...

Last night was a Global Pub Reunion for the University of East Anglia, where I studied half a lifetime ago for my BSc in Biological Sciences.

The UEA is celebrating its 46th anniversary this year and the alumni association decided it would be good to organise groups of graduates to share a drink and a few memories around the world. I volunteered to host the Helsinki event, at my almost-local, Molly Malone's Irish Bar.

Apparently, there are more than 35 UEA graduates in Finland, the association had email addresses for five in Helsinki. So, I was delighted that we had a turnout of six former students, though most of the others hadn't even started school at the time I graduated.

Their talk of computer labs with several PCs sharing one printer compared with my half-unit of computer programming, done in Fortran on punched cards and and run in two batches a day on an ICL George 4 mainframe. The mobile phone I use every day now has significantly more computing power than that device, but it was that first exposure to computing that changed the direction of my career, away from being a research scientist and towards the world of IT.

We also learned a little about the university today, through a quiz supplied by the alumni association. UEA is ranked amongst the top three for student satisfaction according to the first National Student Survey and in the top 20 in the UK by the Sunday Times. It also came top of the most recent research effectiveness league table published by Research Fortnight. We are among some 85,000 alumni, united by the university's motto, "do different". I believe I have lived up to that since and continue to be grateful for my time at UEA and the impact it has had on my life. So cheers to the other 84,994 or so who were with us in spirit last night!