Careers Hive event - Edinburg Science, Outreach and STEM Careers.

S.O.N.A.L.I
Craft Prospect
Published in
3 min readMar 4, 2020

(This is a Guest post by Cassandra Mercury and edited by Sonali Mohapatra)

STEM careers can take you to varied places. In my own career, I have designed large structures, built-up space flight hardware in clean rooms, tested new parachute designs in the California desert with a rocket sled, coded up testing programs, and built small components that will go onto a CubeSat payload. No one program is quite like another!

That is why I think it is so important to expose young people to the range of jobs they can do within STEM. There are many paths and many ways to make an impact on the world through a STEM career and so last week I volunteered with Edinburgh Science for their Careers Hive event at the National Museum of Scotland. This was an immersive event that focused on what STEM professionals do, the challenges the world will face in the future, and how those problems might be solved to help create a better world.

The Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland was transformed into an interactive activity centre where over 3,000 students in S1-S3 visited over a week’s time and were able to explore various exhibitions as well as interact with STEM professionals to talk about their career path. This is a particularly important time in these students’ lives as they start to select the electives they wish to pursue and which subjects they plan to sit exams in.

The Energy & Environment section focused on the role energy plays in our lives, how people are solving the energy problems facing us now and into the future, as well as the extreme environments that many STEM careers can take you to.

It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to share with the students the joys of science and engineering in new ways. Besides sharing my career path, I was also able to help the students experience performing under adverse conditions — they were nestled into an inverter and turned nearly upside down before being put under pressure to perform tasks! It was a fun way to demonstrate the need to take your creative thinking skills with you wherever you go — even if upside down!

This post is written by Cassandra Mercury. Cassandra is Space Quantum MAIT Engineer at Craft Prospect and has extensive previous experience in the space industry.

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S.O.N.A.L.I
Craft Prospect

Quantum space scientist, thinker, disrupter, feminist, poet, speaker.