Nicholas went to the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1995 to study a B.Sc in Mechanical Engineering, concentrating on subjects like continuum mechanics, machine dynamics, vibrational analysis and stress analysis. Memorable courses were a semester in partial differential equations with George Ellis and an astronomy course with Don Kurtz. He won the SASOL prize for third year design, dean’s merit list every year and was finally awarded his degree with first class honours. His final year thesis was written on the flow characteristics of a globe control valve. It involved measuring the flow of water (with a head of ~10 metres) through the valve, recording the pressure and temperature (temperature didn’t change much) either side of the valve and plotting it verse the percent open of the valve. It was all controlled via a 386 with software written in TrueBASIC .
His M.Sc was originally going to be in CIM or Computer Integrated Manufacture, but a short 1-month summer school at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in January 1999 convinced him that Astronomical Engineering is a fascinating field.

He did his Masters by dissertation on a topic entitled “An Investigation In to the Fibre Instrument Feed for the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)”. It was co-supervised by David Buckley (SAAO), Brandon Reed (UCT) and Jasson Gryzagoridis (UCT). Research on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). Pupil Simulator, which was written up for the degree, was done at the Pennsylvania State University (in State College) under the supervision of Larry Ramsey and Leland Engel. During this period he also worked at the HET (in West Texas) for a period of four months in the latter half of 2000. He assisted in the Hartman Mask characterisations of the Surrogate Spherical Aberration Corrector and characterisation of the Payload as it rotates in rho. He then came back to South Africa for a short period and worked with Jian Swiegers and others on the SALT team on the coordinates of the top nodes of the mirror truss (which drew on the spherical geometry learnt in the Astronomy course) and a specification for the moving baffle for Leon Nel. He then returned to Penn State for a period of a little more than a year to work on the electronics rack for the HET Medium Resolution Spectrometer.

He then returned to Cape Town to work with David Buckley (SALT Project Scientist) on the design of the SALT Fibre-Instrument-Feed (FIF), in October 2002. During this period he was asked to take a short term contract (9 months) co-managing the SAAO MachineSHOP for Darragh O’Donoghue (SAAO Instrument head).
He took the FIF project through to its Critical Design Review in October 2004 before leaving to start up his own company with his family: Engineering Sessions.