Dominus Illuminatio Mea

What? Is that even English? I’ll get to answering it in a second.

Not sure how many of you know, but for a very long time I have been wanting to do a Masters and also dabble in the world of Academia Research. I have done some commercial research in the past which I thoroughly enjoyed but never done any Academia research - well not yet anyway’s.  <p> <img src="images/oxforduniversitynewcresttrans1.gif" alt=""/> </p>

After procrastinating on this for a long time, and with many other factors which I’d rather not get into here, finally the time came and I just had to try and pick this up again. After all I had been postponing this for over a decade and it was about time I got around to it!

I finally took the plunge a few months ago and started doing my research on various universities and options and in the end settled down on Oxford. I went to their open day a few months ago, and decided it was an excellent opportunity for me in one of the top schools in the world! After applying to them and going thru the interview process, etc. I was glad to have been accepted by the school into their part-time masters program. Needless to say those who know me were flabbergasted and wondered, how the heck did *I* (of all the people get in)!

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I am going to be joining the Software Engineering Programme at Oxford and will be starting soon and am quite excited about the whole thing - sort of like a kid in a candy store - or me in Fry’s is probably the better analogy (sorry if you don’t get that last part - you need to have been hanging out with me for that

). This is a part time program - which means I will continue to work full time. Also it will give me an opportunity to plug in to some of the research going on at Oxford and it would be up to me (or so I believe) on how deep I want to get involved with the research. Irrespective in addition to Avanade, this would be dominating most of my time outside of work and you can get bet you will see some posts related to this over the next few months. Another way to sum it up would be - I won’t have a life for the next 2-3 years.

But joking aside, Oxford topped Guardian&rsquo;s league table for the third time in a year - and is the number one university in the UK in overall ranking. And the fact it increased it&rsquo;s lead over Cambridge was just icing on the cake.

The whole Oxford vs. Cambridge is new to me as well and I am surely going to have more details on that later.

Getting back to the title of this post, Dominus Illuminatio Mea roughly translated to “the Lord is my light” and is the Legend in the Coat of Arms of the University of Oxford. If you see the image carefully you can see the words in the book which has a few leather straps on the left. The arms were adopted around the year 1400 AD and you can read about their significance and origin here . The University has a long rich history - full of tradition, much of which is new to me and over the next few weeks I would surely be posting some of the things I find new and interesting.

Update: Changed some minor sentence construction.