Giving STEMM a place in a crowded careers space

By Edmond Yau, Anshu Bansal, Jing Pang, Amritha Nair and Harry Jenkins

Last month, just before Easter, we were joined by 21 students of black heritage for a special week-long interactive programme to shed light on the opportunities that a science, technology, engineering, maths or medical education can open up – especially in the technology transfer and innovation arena.

Across our team, over 20 staff volunteered their time, insights and expertise for the programme, and it’s fair to say that once again we loved delivering it!

As much as anything, it keeps us on our toes and thinking differently about the work we do. And for the students, well they said they loved it too (and not just the pizza for lunch!)

Pitching in for success

Throughout the week, the students were guided towards the final project – a pitch to ‘sell’ us the technology they had been assigned from Imperial’s IP catalogue. Having been set the challenge on day one, the sessions throughout the week gave them additional skills and insights, culminating in the final pitch on Friday.

The creativity the students demonstrated, and the application of the information we shared during the sessions in the week, showed a terrific amount of understanding of the task, the technologies themselves and the techniques to communicate their work, all of which made for compelling presentations. It reminded us of why we love doing what we do in order to deliver real-world impact for people around the world, through technology licensing and commercialisation.

It also made us think back to what we were doing when we were in our mid-teens, and we were amazed at their aptitude at such a young age. It was fascinating to hear how their minds worked when coming up with ideas for how to pitch their technologies, and to see how receptive they were to our input as well.

There are a few ideas we may well borrow for our work going forward, as well as sharing with the relevant portfolio manager – the winning team were working on pitching Dr Claire Higgins’s technology, which deploys cytokines to heal wounds and reduce scars, and it was particularly fascinating to also hear how the one team pitched Professor Matthew Fuchter’s circularly polarised OLEDs specifically with applications to the gaming industry.

You can find out more about the technologies by clicking the links. Check out Dr Claire Higgins’s presentation about her technology from Imperial.Tech.Pitch in May 2021. Imperial.Tech.Pitch: Affordable technologies for an ageing society

A journey of discovery, for them and us

What consistently amazed us was the depth and quality of the questions that the students asked, reflecting that they were actively engaged with the programme – a testament to our colleagues’ efforts in producing a top-quality set of activities, as well as the students’ desire to learn and get everything they could out of the week; after all, they were giving up the first week of the Easter holidays to be with us.

Their curiosity was exciting to see, and reminded a few of us of ourselves – at least, some of our younger selves anyway! We have the privilege of working at a university where asking questions is actively encouraged as we pursue the answers to the great challenges of our generation, and we were all delighted to see that the future is in safe hands with the next cohort that are coming through.

Some of the ways they incorporated the activities were eye-catching, too. During Claudio’s Tech Foresight workshop, the students combined two or more of the ideas from our Table of Disruptive Technologies to create things like organ printing, artificial wombs and predictive gene-based healthcare, then pitched them as investable concepts based on the sessions they’d had earlier in the week.

When tasked with creating an engagement piece to explore the fantastic PRESTIGE-AF project that we’re coordinating, one group came up with the idea for an exhibition in form of a giant head, through which the public could walk through and understand the different connections within the brain that, when compromised, can lead to stroke.

The real kicker for why I (Harry) was so impressed was that they also then said it could be reused for different purposes depending on what neurological condition we wanted to talk about, making it both interactive and sustainable. It’s definitely given us food for thought for when it comes to communicating the findings of this and other projects.

A diverse range of careers and opportunities

Throughout the week we were keen to share our experiences of how we came to work in our roles at a world-leading university. Some of us had initially pursued some form of academic or research career, while others had found our niche as a professional within the sector thanks to our grounding in STEMM.

The students all expressed their interest in the different ways that we apply our knowledge to tackling problems – whether these are the creative ways of improving our day-to-day processes, or in identifying suitable solutions from across Imperial’s diverse portfolio to help businesses and organisations meet their objectives.

Many of them also said afterwards how the week had given them insights into the application process for university and the support available, too – which is great to hear as we co-developed the sessions with the Outreach team to ensure more students like these feel more confident about pursuing opportunities and STEMM careers via higher education.

Thanks to this terrific experience, we’re all more enthused about the future and in delivering similar programmes going forwards!

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For more information about working with us the Outreach team for similar programmes, be sure to comment on this post, or email Anshu in the first instance.?