On May 23, Mrs Smith and Miss Radford hosted a STEM Slam event to introduce the students to just a small selection of the careers that involve STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths).
The students were very fortunate to have six wonderful guest speakers who entertained over 160 people and made themselves available for questions at the end.
Tony Milanoswki, Head of Winery at Rathfinny Wine Estate, took the audience through the wealth of STEM-related careers involved in winemaking. From the biology and botany related to the vines, the mechanical engineering of the machinery to the biochemical engineering of the actual winemaking itself.
Dylan Lewis, PhD student in Quantum Computing, described his route to becoming a PhD student. Not only were students interested to hear about what his day-to-day research looks like, they found it useful to hear that Dylan had tried a career in financial consulting first but then changed to go back into academia.
Jude Holmes, Medical Imaging Research Assistant at UCL, gave students a flavour of the sheer diversity of her career to date and how varied her day-to-day job can be. It was great to hear about her experiences presenting at a major conference on Radiology.
Alix Lyons, Medical Engineer, and Research Fellow in Upper Limb Prosthetics (and Hurst Alumni) gave us an excellent insight into the work she does on prosthetics and how she often works as an interface between the design and engineering and the clinical application. Her working days are incredibly diverse – from producing articles for Frontiers for Young Minds to working with the NHS to develop new policies to presenting internationally, to working in the lab testing new kit.
Neil and Mollie from Audiotonix, a company specialising in the design, engineering and manufacture of professional audio mixing consoles. Neil summarised for us the diversity of the business itself, including the many different STEM careers involved in the different parts of the business. Mollie gave us a flavour of her journey and early career working for Audiotonix, including some of the perks of being at top end music performances to provide product support for the mixing consoles.
Annora Sundararajan, National Physics Laboratory, explained her career in academia and the exciting work she has done on detecting dark matter and neutrinos. While at NPL she was responsible for the MSF time signal that provides accurate sources of UK time but has most recently started a Masters in Particle Physics.
“ We firmly believe one of the best ways to help young people to make the best choices for their future is to show the breadth and depth of careers on offer. We are very much looking forward to hosting the STEM Slam annually to explore more careers from across design, engineering, computing, biology, chemistry, physics and maths. ” Naomi Smith, Head of Physics