Welcome to the ‘About’ page!
I’m Martyn, a 20 year old Mathematics student from Newcastle.
I’m going to give a breif history of me, and what i’ve been up to over the past few years of my life. I’ll skip the REALLY young bits, as to be honest, there isn’t much to say! (And I probably can’t remember it anyway).
I was born in a town just outside Newcastle called Shotley Bridge, and lived not so far from there (about 15 minutes drive) for the most part of my life. When the time came, I started nursery at Oxhill Nursery School, and then moved on to Tanfield Infants, then Tanfield Juniors, and finally Tanfield Secondary School. Most of my current hobbies and interests come from the time I was at secondary school.
Through the later years of my time there, I started getting quite interested in music. I’d had keyboard lessons from a younger age, so I had a basic grasp of the concepts of music, but I decided that I wanted to get lessons for the saxaphone. I eventually ended up playing the flute for about a year, and soon after, I got into what might be generalised as ‘rock’ music. I concequently picked up playing the guitar, and stopped taking lessons for the flute. My musical tastes at present pretty much come from those few years, although nowdays i’m more into ‘technical’ and instrumental music.
At about the same time, I was given an opportunity to be part of a School radio project, and broadcast my own show, ‘Martyn In The Morning’ on the station (Sky Blue Radio!). It was mostly pre-recorded shows, since I still had to be in lessons, but during some shows after school hours, I went out live for ‘Drive Time’ with my now good friend, Grant, who was the techie, and general brains, for the entire operation. My show was pretty much just a music show, with various bits and bobs such as ‘top 10s’ thrown in for good measure. The music I actually played was a bit of a mix, but I remember quite vividly playing the new Limp Bizkit song (Take A Look Around) a couple of times, which might have also aided into my roots in my tastes in music nowdays.
Aside from music (Which I didn’t actually take as a GCSE past year 9), I was always interested in computing. I took a GNVQ course in ICT, and managed to get a Merit in the course. I was always on ‘Counterstrike’, and playing various other computer games, and just through general computer using, picked computing up really quickly. Once I knew what I was doing with the internet, I dabbled in designing websites for a bit. Mostly ‘personal’ websites, but one or two were for a purpose (BGS Durham website for example). I guess you woldn’t be reading this right now if I hadn’t taken an interest in web design! (Although, I did get lazy this time around and use a web template).
I did quite well in my GCSEs as a whole, so after school I went on to Durham Sixth form Center. I took Maths, Further Maths, Computing and Graphics.
At that stage, I though I would go on after college to Uni and do some sort of computing degree, since it was the main thing I was interested in. After the first year, I found that I was more interested in Mathematics than computing. Not because the computing course wasn’t good, because at most times, it was really enjoyable, but simply because my further maths lessons were better. Teachers were good, course was interesting and the other folks in my class were pretty cool. It obviously changed my opinion enough to make me want to do maths at uni.
College seemed to fly over. After 2 years, many friends, exams, and bus journeys, I eventually left and went to Newcastle uni. By this point, i’ve been playing guitar for a good 5 years, and i’m still listening to my ‘rock’ music. Due to certain influences in college, and my guitar teacher also, i’ve been listening to alot of Dream Theater. Possibly my favourite band of all time, they pretty sum up my musical tastes in one go.
First year of uni went really well. Freshers week was awesome, and I managed to make the photos section in a local newspaper with a group of friends, as we were out in town, and got our photo taken on the street. Unknown to me at the time, the same night i’d also had my photo taken while in a club, and this year discovered that I appeared in this years freshers newspaper! Once blurred with a friend on the front cover, and another time, non-blurred (?) inside the paper itself.
The first year of the degree went ok. Alot of the material we covered i’d already seen in my further maths course, so revision for exams and doing homeworks was fairly straightforward. I had plenty of time to spare during that year, and joined a Gaming society called NCL Gaming. After taking a active interest in the entire society, I now come under the title of ‘Treasurer’, and give input into maintaining the society website.
The second year went quite peachy also, managed to do ok in exams and did lots of ‘School of Maths Open Day’ things, meeting loads of new people. I also started to learn to fly at Northumbria Flying School rather randomly. It’s been something I wanted to do for a while, just never really got up and did it! Pretty expensive to do, but what can I say? - There’s nothing else i’d rather spend my money on!
Everything else is still to be written…