I did quite well with my OND but I was the last year to do the original (1970s?) version. That course worked better for me because it made you think rather than just throwing information at you and hoping it would stick. There was a time, thanks to that course, that I was quite good at calculus (though integration was always a pain). And I'd only left with school with a grade 2 in CSE maths.
First 'maths' lesson of the HND course we were given a page of calculus formula and told those would be the only ones we'd encounter in the exams. And maths was optional after the first term.
So it was back to listening to lecturers droning on and trying to make notes in an attempt to remember everything. Plus analogue electronics is just hard I remember one part where we were being taught how to create power supply circuitry. Every single step seemed to need yet another circuit to stabilise the last one.
Anyway I was already into computers and had begun to realise that I could program them as easily and 'thoughtlessly'(*) as I could talk to people. Possibly more so. So I decided to switch careers and get paid for doing something laughably easy. That was in the mid 1980s and I've never regretted that decision. Just call me the computer whisperer :)
(*)Without obvious conscious thought I should say. The results of my endeavours show that some form of mental processing is taking place but damned if I'm aware of it any more than I'm aware of how I construct coherent English sentences :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
