The start of 1987 brought with it a new semester at Technikon Witwatersrand, freshly relocated to its new premises near Ellis Park. Pete and I were firm friends by then. I’d managed to catch up on the computer course by doing it at night, and something in me had shifted. For the first time, I decided to actually apply myself academically.
And suddenly, the world changed.
My test scores shot up. I started getting results I’d never seen before. Now, I’d never thought of myself as stupid. But when you grow up next to someone like Niels—an academic juggernaut—it’s easy to just assume you’re not in the same league. What hadn’t occurred to me was the possibility that maybe he had just worked harder.
By the end of the semester, I wasn’t just doing well—I was near the top of the class. And when the final results came out, I was at the top by a long way. Distinctions in all six subjects. All of them.
Returning to R.J. Spargo for my third practical semester, I discovered that success even paid—literally. They added a hundred rand bonus to my salary for every subject I’d passed with distinction. But beyond the money, something far more unexpected happened: people started taking me seriously. Niels did. Even my father, on our holiday that August, was openly boasting to his friends about how well I was doing. That might have been the most shocking bit of all.
As the academic year wound down, I elected to take T3 mathematics as an optional extra at night whilst I wsa completing my third practical session at Spargo's. Pete and I started talking about university—real university. The idea felt a bit mad. To get into engineering at Wits University, you needed straight A’s in matric. Neither of us had that. But now, with two years of strong Technikon academics under our belts and excellent marks in T3 maths, we had a shot. More importantly, our parents were on board and willing to pay.
So we applied.
By that point, my interest in aircraft had grown into something serious—though the whole flying story is a saga for another chapter. But aeronautical engineering, the most elite program on offer, felt like a natural choice. Partly because of the subject itself. And partly, if I’m being honest, because I’d found a new way of commanding attention—real attention—from people who mattered. People who looked at my marks and actually saw something.
We were called in for an interview with the Dean of Engineering at Wits. Oddly, Pete and I were interviewed together. I still don’t know how or why that happened, but I remember it clearly. The Dean looked at us and said, “You’ve got very impressive marks, but this is a university—not Technikon. The standards here are a lot higher.”
Of course, all our lecturers at Technikon had insisted their standards were equal, so we both just nodded along and smiled. We didn’t believe him for a second.
But the result? We were both accepted. Pete into mechanical engineering, and me into aeronautical. We would be taking exactly the same subjects for the first two year and only start diverging in year three and four. I’d informed Sidney of my plans, and he was incredibly generous about the whole thing. He not only released me from my contractual obligations to complete my National Higher Diploma at R.J. Spargo, he gave me a glowing letter of recommendation to support my university application.
That was the moment I learned a fundamental truth: academic success isn’t just about brainpower—it’s about effort. Grit. Focus. I discovered it was actually much easier to throw yourself into your studies than to face the hard daily grind of life as a journeyman.
That’s when my real academic life began.