I have often looked back on my early high school education and wondered “what if?”…
What if an inspirational engineer had wandered into my assembly and told me that being able to calculate percentages, fractions or even doing basic algebra would be so useful in my future work?
What if a stimulating scientist had shown me that the world needed inquisitive minds and validated my endless questions about “how this helps in real life”?
I often asked myself: What if I had been inspired, what else might I have achieved?
Giving meaning and purpose to a young person’s education can be life changing. Alongside the obvious benefits of inspiring, guiding and encouraging young people to fully engage with their subjects, having contact with a STEM ambassador can also serve to amplify their ambitions and open their eyes to the possibility of careers they did not even know existed.
In my experience as a STEM Ambassador, most young people I speak with know that they want a good job which pays enough to achieve their life goals. They also have a clear idea of what they like and don’t like, or the subjects they find most interesting at school. What they seem to lack, in many cases, is the awareness that they can connect these things and that excelling at the subjects they enjoy can lead to an interesting and rewarding career. Perhaps the all-consuming idea of getting a job has completely clouded the concept of “starting a career." I can imagine that it is daunting and almost impossible to select a path without students asking themselves “what if?”.
It is for this reason that I have always wanted to help in some way to show young people that they can build a career out of the things that they enjoy, or the subjects they excel at.
The old adage “you can be it, if you can see it…” springs to mind.
I asked myself how I could make the most of my limited time, share my story and appeal to students. This is when I discovered STEM Learning’s online mentoring program. CIBSE have partnered with STEM Learning and the platform is accessible to all CIBSE STEM Ambassadors.
I always imagined that mentoring young people would be time-consuming and complicated. Working around a busy schedule and with many other commitments, I was concerned that I would never be able to make a significant enough contribution to be worthwhile.
Once I was registered as a CIBSE STEM Ambassador, I was able to create a profile on the mentoring platform. This platform allows you to choose the number of young people who can connect with you, helping you to manage the time you need to commit.
Potential mentees can select you from a list of available mentors, so your experience and skills match their interests. At the end of the day, they choose to engage with you, so there is usually something in your profile that has piqued their interest.
One of the best things I have discovered while using the platform, is that I can fit it in around my own schedule. It is so easy to receive messages and respond to questions on the system that it does not take much time at all. Perhaps at most a few hours a week is sufficient.
Both mentors and mentees access the system online or via an app, and I found it easy to get the conversations going. The support team are superb, and the program is guided by a schedule of topics, with supporting documentation to help you know how best to tackle the kinds of questions arising from your group of mentees.
The fact that this is done via remote messaging, which can be done at your own pace and in your own time, is a brilliant way to fit in mentoring around a busy schedule.
I have found the process incredibly rewarding, and I hope that the young people I have engaged with go on to expand their careers in their chosen subjects. The first step is to register as a CIBSE STEM ambassador!
In this post, Andy refers to the STEM Ambassador mentoring platform where you can mentor students. This is part of the CIBSE STEM Ambassador program (available to those in the UK) and is separate to the CIBSE Mentoring Platform, which encourages all CIBSE members to mentor each other. The CIBSE Mentoring Platform is aimed at those who are currently undertaking a university course or are already working in building services engineering related fields.