Biography | Andrew Wilson — The Law Degree He Left Unfinished at Gardens Point

The usual Silicon Valley story starts with a computer-science degree. Wilson's paper trail starts with a law course he did not finish.

After leaving Emmanuel College on the Gold Coast in 1991, he enrolled at Queensland University of Technology to study law.

The Faculty of Law sits on the Gardens Point campus, between the Brisbane River and the City Botanic Gardens, in the city's old government precinct.

C Block still houses the law library and the moot court. That is the public building a visitor can stand in front of.

He left before the degree. Company profiles and later interviews treat the dropout as a fact, not a scandal.

What he did next was the late-1990s internet boom in Sydney: building Australian sites for foreign firms, then helping raise money for start-ups, until that market broke in 1999.

The unfinished law course is the hinge. Without it, the Gold Coast EA studio job in May 2000 looks like a first act instead of a swerve.

Gardens Point is not a shrine. It is a working campus that happens to be the last classroom associated with the man who later ran Electronic Arts.

The sources agree on the institution and the incomplete degree. They do not publish a withdrawal date, so this pin uses the year he left school and began the course.

Photo: Chris Olszewski (Kgbo), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Gardens Point campus, March 2020.