Alumni

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Alumni in the public eye

Andrew Davidson
(EAM, 1995-1998)
Melanie Hill
(COGS, 1994-1997)

40,000 applicants. 24 cameras. 11 housemates. 2 Sussex alumni.

Not quite a fly-on-the-wall gameshow, not quite a docu-soap, Big Brother was undoubtedly this summer's hot screen hit. It kept six million TV viewers on tenterhooks for nine weeks and made mini-celebrities of two Sussex alumni, Andrew Davidson and Melanie Hill.

The two graduates were in the same year at Sussex, but had never met until they entered the Big Brother house in East London. Within hours, they had discovered the campus connection and 'Randy Andy', 24, had revealed he fancied 26-year-old Mel, who famously objects to comparisons with her Spice Girl namesake.

While Andy was out of the reaches of the media in the Big Brother house, his father told the Evening Argus: "Brighton is a great place for bars and nightlife, so he really enjoyed himself there. He had a great time at Sussex, a pretty wild time, but he worked very hard too."

He must have done some studying, because Andy - who went on to become a business development manager for American Airlines - got a 2:1 in his English and Media Studies BA.

There wasn't much of anything to do in the Big Brother house, but just before he left at the end of week three, Andy offered one of the programme's few hints of romance in the form of a lingering kiss with Mel.

Once Andy had been evicted, Sussex hopes rested on Mel, who had taken extended leave from her job as a sales and marketing executive in the banking industry to appear in the show.

Nominated only once and swiftly evicted in week eight, Mel didn't manage to win the £70,000 prize and make her mum proud. At least she did that back in 1997, when she graduated from Sussex with an upper second degree in psychology - which she described on the Big Brother website as her greatest achievement. Quite right.

Why Petra loved cosmopolitan Sussex

She's been chosen by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of its 'Women of Achievement' for 2000, but in 1984 her teachers advised 16-year-old Petra Boynton to leave school.

Undaunted, Petra moved to a local technical college and went on to take a BA in Social Psychology at Sussex. Petra received a full maintenance grant for her studies, from 1988-91. "I wouldn't have been able to come otherwise," she says.

"I had a wonderful time at Sussex - I absolutely loved it. I walked out of the underpass and I thought, I just want to be here. It was so international: at Sussex you got used to mixing with people from all over the world."

Petra's tutors in SOC included Helga Dittmar, Peter Smith and Barbara Lloyd. "The teaching was excellent: we had really diverse courses and very enthusiastic teachers."

She then embarked on a PhD at Aston Business School, in Applied Human Psychology. "I was very sad to go, actually," Petra recalls. "I went from the leafy fields of Sussex to Spaghetti Junction - and Aston was a lot more conservative."

Now a Wellcome Research Fellow at London's Royal Free Hospital, Petra is the editor of the Psychology of Women journal and lectures for the Open University. Not surprisingly, she also visits schools - especially in deprived areas - to persuade teenagers to continue with their education.