Joanna McLenaghan walked quite literally in her father\u2019s footsteps when she followed dad Ian across the stage to collect identical degrees recently at a ceremony staged by The Open University.<\/p>\n
The pair signed up for an OU MSc in Maths in the same year and there followed six years of \u201ctotal rivalry\u201d to see who could get the best marks for assignments.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the third degree for Joanna, 36, from Kingston Upon Thames, who is now a data scientist managing a team of people at Gousto, the recipe box company.<\/p>\n
She earned a first-class degree in physics at Oxford followed by a doctorate in the same subject from the University of St Andrews. But her latest achievement was hard won by burning the midnight oil whilst working full time.<\/p>\n
The OU is one of the largest universities in Europe with more than 208,000 students. Of those directly registered with the OU, 71 per cent work part-time or full time.<\/p>\n
Jo, as she is also known, says her OU degree was definitely a factor in her gaining her latest job at Gousto as she says employers know the \u201clevel of effort and commitment that you have to put in, particularly doing something over six years on top of a job\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWhilst I already had the undergraduate degree and a PhD, I think as an employer, when you’re looking through hundreds of applications having something like this on a CV really helps you to shine,\u201d she said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ian, 66, from Epsom in Surrey, is full of praise for his daughter:<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m incredibly proud of her achievements. We might have started out on the same pathway but she’s much more of a people person, who’s capable of doing things like management.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThat’s something I avoided like the plague when I was working. I just wanted to go away in a cupboard somewhere and work on my own solving technical problems.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yet Ian is something of an academic himself. He also<\/em> has an Oxford degree in physics, and in the same subject holds a doctorate from Imperial College as well as an MS from the California Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n He began his MSc while semi-retired to \u201ckeep Alzheimer\u2019s at bay\u201d but also admitted \u201cI guess we like studying\u201d.<\/p>\n Jo says she clearly remembers Ian encouraging her and supporting her studies through childhood:<\/p>\n \u201cI always remember, before I went to high school, that my dad and I had these study sessions where he cut out these different molecules and then we’d attach them together with paper clips.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAnd he was always buying me things like magnet sets, so he definitely encouraged me from a young age.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n She says once he bought her a book on Java programming! For Jo, her dad is an inspiration:<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s had a lifelong love of learning that he\u2019s been willing to pass on. He taught himself coding and computer programming and it\u2019s that curiosity that has guided him his whole life.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n She added:<\/p>\n \u201cI think a lot of people think you just learn when you’re a child; a teenager and then you when you go to university and then that’s it!<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBut I think my dad has really shown me that you have to keep picking things up and that learning isn’t a chore. It’s something you can really love.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joanna McLenaghan walked quite literally in her father\u2019s footsteps when she followed dad Ian across the stage to collect identical degrees recently at a ceremony staged by The Open University. The pair signed up for an OU MSc in Maths in the same year and there followed six years of \u201ctotal rivalry\u201d to see who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":23625,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1525,1640],"class_list":["post-23624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-social-sciences","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}