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Question 2: What pathway did you follow to get to where you are? What courses of study, or qualifications did you need?

As the first year to take GCSEs, I took the maximum eight and got all grades, ‘B’s and ‘C’s. But from there, my path is not a usual one. I eschewed taking A-levels to work for two years, but it meant I had a car before my peers had gone back to start their AS levels. However, science still beckoned and I began work as a Medical Laboratory Assistant in the Microbiology department of the Manor Hospital in Walsall. Continue reading “The STEMNET case study (part 2)”

Question 1: How did you first become interested in STEM as a career? Was there a moment or intervention at school that prompted your career choice?  E.g. an experience of work, an inspirational teacher, family member etc

From the first time I tried to remove all the iron filings from the garden with a magnet I found, I knew that science was my future. It was days before my parents found me at the end of the garden with a jam jar of iron rubbish. I then heard these funny grains of material were bits of meteorite and I was unstoppable. The perennially ‘cool’ space and astronomy was living in my garden. My father showed me how to make an electromagnet using a battery, wire and a nail. To this day, my mother’s cutlery still comes out of the drawer en masse. What I would later learn to be ‘physics’ was my new cool tool for interesting stuff. Continue reading “The STEMNET case study (part 1)”

It might be a while back now, but I have some fab memories of working the festival. So many, in fact, that leaving it until now has allowed me chance to focus on the things that really stuck out. There is so much going on and even though I was only there for the last four days, I really need to crop the frame to get the best of it.

Continue reading “So then… Cheltenham Science Festival 2012”