For the last seven years, Mark Healey has been working for South Yorkshire Police, and through his employment, he has recently completed a distance learning course with the Open University, funded by the Police.  He studied for over two and a half years while working full time, starting just before the COVID lockdown.

So being stuck at home 24x7 gave me plenty of time to study. Each of the six modules was very different, some of them required essays, some full project reports, and one featured a full exam. The skills I picked up have already had a great impact on my professional career.

Mark studied at Hymers College from 1986 to 1992 before having a gap year working for Reckitt and Colman, as it was then, before going to UMIST to study Chemistry at BSc. Unfortunately, he wasn't successful in his university course and returned to Hull, where he started working for KCOM in their Internet brand as an IT professional. After 16 years there, he moved on to Heron Foods, and then the Police, so always worked locally. He is now a Senior Cyber Security Engineer for South Yorkshire Police.

Mark has remained in touch with some of his classmates via Facebook and was inspired by Alex Sutton. One of his memories from school involved chemistry experiments.

Something you probably couldn't get away with now: making small amounts of explosives in the Chemistry labs, and then sprinkling them down the Physics corridor!

Whilst at Hymers, Mark was part of a quiz team for the school and can be seen in the main photo with Mr Sutton and teammates, Glen Rangwala and Daniel O'Gorman.

In his free time at school, he spent a lot of time in Mr Harston's computer room.

I was never really a society type of person, but I learnt a lot about computing in there that sparked my interest when I made it to university.

Congratulations, Mark, on your Master of Science in Computing.