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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and I'm joined by Jasmin, Alasdair and Sophie to talk about University and how useful it was for getting us to where we are now we have a audience from the EDT joining us and we'll be answering their questions by a live q a chat this audience is here on their insights University course so that's why we've
created this episode that we have so Jasmine what are you doing currently and how did you get there so I'm a postdoc which means I have a PhD and do research at University I work at Imperial and do research in the environmental impacts of different decolonization Pathways for NetZero and basically I got to where I am because I have basically I went to University and decided I want to stay forever and ever and ever so I did my undergrad then went straight into a PhD and then went into a postdoc
I did move my underground and PhD at the same university university of Manchester which is where I know Antonio from and then I got my postdoc pretty much immediately after my PhD at Imperial and I've been here rather since that's great Jasmine and it is really funny because we were in the same research group so some of my background will line up with Jasmine but um Alistair you have a different background to most of us yeah sure I'm doing a startup with Sophie
called carbon neutral fuels and the idea is that we want to suck CO2 out of the air and recycle it into low carbon fuels to try and decarbonize industries like Aviation and long distance transport where batteries are a bit too heavy and how I got here was a bit of a strange journey in the um I studied computer science at Imperial and then after that I started a cloud computing company which I did for 15 years but I was always interested in energy and climate change and um so I saw my previous
company and I was fortunate to meet Sophie at Copper 26 and we spoke about saving the planet and uh then we we decided to start the company I love that story because you know you hear about conferences and going to them and you know you wonder what action comes out of it so it's great that you know we have this company come out of it so Sophie if you could talk about uh your background sure yes my background is chemistry um I went to University of Manchester
after college and spent a glorious three years there having a really grand time learning about all things electrons and also all things like how to pay an electricity bill um which is really great um I then went to work in the nuclear industry which again was really interesting quite different but applying that chemistry side but found that actually whilst I loved the science and the lab-based side of it actually my my energies lay more in wanting to work on
climate change specifically and within that in a startup environment which was amazing when Alistair got in touch and said I've got this crazy idea do you fancy giving it a go so um left the industry a couple of years ago and I've been working in sustainability and climate change ever since which has been really fascinating but we obviously went to Manchester too Antonia so what's your background yes so I started well I actually here's here's some insights to University I
didn't get into University first time I didn't make my grades so I had to go through clearing and I went on to a foundation year for my degree chemical engineering um I did that because I had options to do chemistry like Sophie and we might have met but um I instead stuck to my original degree choice and did an extra year met lovely people and eventually I did meet Sophie from Friends yeah it was it was meant to be we're supposed to meet eventually and then I
spent a bit of time doing uh post-doc uh not postdoc sorry postgraduate research and then I found a job in energy management so I'm a consultant helping companies reduce their energy usage and to be more sustainable so I've also achieved my my dream of trying to help the planet as well do you ever look back and think after they're done chemistry no I don't actually I'm really pleased I didn't choose chemistry well what would be your pitch to convince me to do chemistry so I think gosh
you know I really loved doing it actually because I I did three topics a level I did chemistry French and maths and then thought oh my goodness what am I gonna do and it was I I think when you're when you're in the midst of it it feels like such a big decision that you have to make and I actually originally started applying for geography because I thought oh I'm not good enough to do any of those um but I really love the natural world and maybe I could give that a go and try
something different but it actually worked out quite well um doing chemistry so I would say if maybe I wouldn't try and convert your mind to controversially I'd just say go for what you want to do follow your energies and mine happened to be chemistry oh I'm happy because I I really wanted something applied I think I liked that aspect I didn't realize how technical engineering was until I was in it and how much physics is involved but I'm glad I did it because it's kind of
that direct link into the real world the the world that we see based physically yeah contrary to the name chemical engineering isn't really engineering chemistry we did one module in chemistry in first year and that was it the rest was just physics and maths yes yeah we're having to do a lot of chemical engineering in our new startup and uh I've I've been happy to learn all about it it's just been quite interesting given my computer science background but I I still remember a huge
amount of of my chemistry from high school because I was fortunate that we had some really great physics and chemistry teachers and um that was my big interest was was physics and and chemistry um I was denied doing biology because my my parents insisted that I do a second language and I was made and I don't remember any of it but I'm pretty sure if I'd done biology um so if if your parents try and make you do something you don't want to do try and convince them that you're just
not going to remember it yeah that is a great bit of advice yeah I think it's about like finding what you are drawn to but also what you're good at as well isn't it yeah and I think at Uni sometimes it doesn't necessarily have to be that you're there to learn and to to be part of a sort of growing knowledge base and that's really exciting but actually it's all the other sort of outside worldly skills that you can pick up then you can then I mentioned learning how to
pay an electricity bill living by yourself um we spoke a bit before this podcast Antonio about different hobbies and organizations that you can get involved with and how actually they're really a big part of your whole experience yeah I really enjoyed being part of student societies I got a bit of leadership experience by running a society also doing some events organizing and that's when you learn some other skills but also trying to figure out how can I develop more skills basically and what
can I apply that's related to to what I study but also try and Link it to to The Wider world so that was really good and I made loads of friends Sophie I met via by a friend of a friend and same with Laura actually we were also a friend of a friend that I met through Society Engineers about borders so yeah I think I had a lot of good sort of side experiences to the studying and I think Alistair you said you you also did something really different well I I was quite shy and I
um nobody told me that you have at the start of University everyone's kind of meeting each other and that's when your friendships will form for the rest of the time that you're at University and that sort of uh freshers week where all the societies are advertising um what they're providing I'd say get involved as much as you can and if you're shy um just try and overcome it and just put yourself out there and and go and um join these things because I I kind of
regret that I didn't but I did end up making friends with somebody on my course who had started a business in his Secondary School selling uh web hosting online and I knew nothing about setting up businesses and um I had no idea it was so easy in that like somebody who's 15 or 16 years old can just register a company on companies house.gov.uk and and off you go and and it's incredibly easy um so I learned about business and I learned about web hosting and that's
ultimately what I ended up doing after University and I started my own company and um and grew that and we grew to 25 people and we had offices in Old Street in London and some of our clients included like SoundCloud um before they grew too big for us because they they're a huge um company now SoundCloud but yeah we had a lot of fun doing it and um that's how I ended up doing Computing was that that just by my love for Science and Engineering uh Computing and the internet in
particular in the 90s was taking off and I was going to university around the year 2000 and it was really topical and it was really exciting and I think timing can play a big role as well so if there's various trends that are happening like AI is pretty hot right now sometimes it can make sense to to jump on a on a trend and if you can combine you know science and and a hobby that's also quite valuable as well because you'll have passion for it uh we've got a question in the Q a so
someone's saying that they're having trouble picking between Material Science and chemical engineering so play me new Antonia we got this it may be selfish well I was gonna say how did you choose your degree because I actually did kind of consider Material Science well I never wanted to do an engineering subject so for background contacts my family is academic so my dad is a mechanical engineer my mum worked at University in China before we came to the UK but she was more in like the
language Department uh so I already had exposure to engineering so I already knew that I wanted to go into an engineering discipline but not the one that my dad is in because basically my dad because he's been he was at University of Manchester formerly known as you missed for decades so he knew people so basically I didn't I wanted to be in an engineering department where my dad couldn't spy on me was basically how I came up with chemical engineering brilliant that's quite a unique case
though isn't it yeah that you want to avoid a certain Department because your parents are in it yeah did you know that my dad actually knew my a-level results before I did wonderful to pick up on what Alistair was saying when choosing your degree a useful exercise might be just to look on job websites and look at job descriptions and things like that because if there's something that picks your interest um you can almost work backwards and say right I'm really interested in
sustainability for instance so again Material Science isn't my bag but um Laura's put in the chat about things that you can look into Battery Technology and making things more efficient and that's all in the sustainability realm which is a really big uh point of interest at the moment so I would definitely recommend looking at Future jobs looking on LinkedIn is an absolute must because there are so many great people out there and so many interesting things so just doing a bit
of research can really help inform that decision but uh going back to the pros and cons of Material Science versus chem end I mean it depends on like what you're personally into because they're both quite different subjects so chemical engineering is more process engineering so you're designing the processes to make things so to make chemicals or fuels or like even food that's chemical engineering Materials Science is more like you're looking at developing materials more rather than
the process of like manufacturing things yeah so that that was basically why I chose chemical engineering was I knew I was interested in physics and chemistry Material Science came up materials engineering came up chemical engineering came up and yeah for me it was the difference between looking in a microscope art materials and seeing if it's a better or worse chemical or material and there's value in that because everything we need is an engineered material we you know
there's lots of things that go into even what we think is simple um like a table it's not just wood it's got It's got materials to cover it so it's got a smooth surface you know the way we treat it there's all these aspects um and I guess I wanted to see you know I see a lot of new technologies but the struggle is getting them to scale and then there's lots of waste once you've started making it so I wanted to sort of tackle that problem uh Alice there's a question for you so they're asking like
how fuels are tested so we're quite an early stage startup and we're still doing the design work and um that's kind of done predominantly on computers and offices and we've got an engineering company that's helping us design our first e-fuels plants um testing of the fuel is something that we'll need to do and there are companies that focus on our first product will be Jack fuel hopefully we're going to make synthetic kerosene and there's an interesting problem with
synthetic kerosene in that it's um it's very pure as a product so it has straight chain hydrocarbons whereas fossil fuel derived kerosene is quite dirty and it contains impurities like sulfur and attic compounds and what's actually happened is that the jet engines have been designed to use the dirty fuel and the seals and the the way it works depend on aromatic compounds and things so we can't put 100 of our fuel into a jet engine um the plane would fall out the sky
apparently but we can blend it up to 50 at the moment and certainly um jet engine manufacturers like Rolls-Royce have testing labs and things so once we get to that stage the plan is to send our fuel off to be tested and hopefully they'll give it a thumbs up yeah gross it's a fascinating world there's there's you just wouldn't think that making a better fuel would actually be a problem you'd think it would be a good thing but but the world is so strange and uh messy
place at times yeah I I love that because also the way we got there was because we inherently have this impurity so why don't we make use of it and now we're trying to go the other way it is is a funny world isn't it Sophie did we cover why you wanted to do chemistry I didn't really know what else I was gonna do so it's not a very good um motivating story but I think sometimes when you have all of these decisions to make it is sometimes best to just go I quite like this topic I can jump in
and I'll give it a go because you actually don't know what's going to come out out the other side I would never have expected having done three years doing chemistry in a lab I would suddenly be working with Alistair on helping to solve climate change you just sometimes don't make those connections so I would maybe say if you are in the midst of a big bubble of chaos and you don't really know what you're going to do it is totally okay to just say I quite like this and I'm gonna see where
it takes me because a lot about uni is about having those connections and not even uni perhaps just about growing up and having experiences about making connections being authentic working out where your energies lie and sometimes we haven't really explored the concept of a gap year or anything like that but sometimes it's okay to just take a pause and to go and work out where you want to be so I don't necessarily have the best intro into chemistry story but I think it's got me
into a good place I think that that's quite common though that a lot of people don't know what they want to do yeah and they kind of go with well I know this is a topic um so I had no idea that chemical engineering existed until I was looking for courses at University I never really knew about the field of engineering so I actually went on EDT courses um and that's why I kind of wanted to to you know work with this on a podcast was because they helped me understand the
different chem you know chemical engineering mechanical engineering civil engineering um and and all sorts um so for me that you know as well as finding what you what your energy is like is find out where it doesn't lie absolutely like go go to those sessions find out and ask those people what do they do and then I I actually thought the at a careers event I thought the chemical Engineers were the most boring people I spoke to that day but you know sometimes your first impression is wrong
any barriers or hurdles in terms of once you've made your mind up on chemical engineering was there ever a a sticking point that might have put you off there was some there were some that like people said have you considered a less dirty um career like because the the picture is as a chemical engineer works on a oil and gas rig petroleum engineering not chemical engineering but some mechanical engineers do that yeah so some people sort of wanted to check how um motivated
I was there might have been some gender bias playing into there there were also like you know family saying oh you're good at science then why not do medicine because it's well paid but it just wasn't my interest and actually the amount of work you have to do is very like valuable for society but for me personally I wouldn't have been able to make it through all that someone's asking if in our University degrees and courses if we were able to choose modules that relate to interests in
climate change that really depends on the course that you do and also the university so some courses University so you do have optional modules but for others you don't get that choice so Antonio when we did camenge that we have options oh yeah mine was chemical engineering with energy and environment actually yeah I had a choice in second year and then like my final year was quite directed yeah I did it at my college and women environmental Technologies minus the water course yeah
mine is the Watercourse which I still think is very useful because a lot of chemical Engineers actually do end up working in wastewater treatment or in water purification or a lot of chemical plants or other manufacturing plants have their own Waste Water treatment on site because they need pure water for whatever they're doing so like Antonio did apparently I didn't I know that at Imperial in the undergrad courses they do have options in their third and fourth year so similar with the mscs
they have options Sophie what about you in chemistry did you have options oh yeah massively yeah massively we did Green chemistry all of those sort of things I think it's great that you know that you want to work in climate change the person that posted that question because that's something that Alistair and I are looking into now is as we grow our team and as we grow our business what sort of people are we going to look to bring on board and that sort of angle of climate change and sustainable
engineering sustainable chemistry um is is really important but I think alistair's story is really interesting because it shows that whilst you might have toys at University actually you can do things after University that influence where you now are working yeah it's apply for seldom a linear path from start to end so you often go off on these these tangents and um uh I I didn't study uh I studied computer science but I didn't study the the real science and um something that was an optional
module when I was studying computer science was Ai and had I chosen to do that it would have been a a dark period where there wasn't much going on in AI obviously now ai is completely taken taken off so timing can be um can be an interesting one as well and I think climate change is definitely something that over the next 10 15 20 years is is going to be very important and um there's going to be a lot of careers in it and there's going to be a huge transition away from fossil fuels and and
um the burning of things to you know Renewables and alternative fuels and things so it's it's quite an exciting space to be in and um there's going to be a lot of opportunity there for a perspective of one of our other podcast members who is a lecturer in civil engineering there is a lot of sustainable civil engineering um going into the course that she teaches so it isn't just limited to you know in a sense like chemistry chemical engineering it can it can expand because
you know if you think about where where climate change could affect and what it could do we've got a you know it's almost like resilience against climate change Technologies to prevent climate change or turn reverse the effects of climate change so or even economic effects of climate change so there is there's all sorts of aspects that the topic could touch yeah there's a school in Imperial who are also my neighbors like they do they have like one side that do like Research into like
economics and climate change yeah and I'd also add technically I don't think it's really stem count system but my friend that's an architect they're finding that a lot of their clients they want like more sustainability in the in the design so there's a lot of like reusing repurposing in more Concepts and Designs so that's even something that I'm teaching some of my clients is you know I'm talking to their procurement teams and supply chain analysts to to understand how do they choose more
sustainable raw materials or how do they understand how the people that they work with are being more sustainable so it really is you know touching every aspect of life someone's asking if we can talk about the research projects that we've worked on so I guess this would be like both at Uni bill so maybe also stuff we've worked on post uni Sophie Alistair I don't think I've I've done any hard research at the moment we're doing our first feasibility study into
our first e-fuels plan and and that's a piece of research uh I suppose but but between now and University um not so much Sophie did you did you work on any I did and they have all left my head which is wholly unhelpful for this but I think it probably goes to show that University is very important but sometimes it's not where your true passions lie I would say I just thought of something and um I did personal Research into nuclear energy for 10 years because I found it interesting and
I kind of found I wanted to to solve climate change in my head and I looked at Renewables and I saw they were intermittent and and I've just followed Brad Graham's and arrived at nuclear and seemed to have um the way we were doing it before I had challenges and I found some new exciting ways of doing nuclear like Morton salt reactors and I ended up going to conferences over 10 years and that was
actually how I ended up at cop 26. and that kind of research into something I found fascinating did lead me to ultimately setting up carbon neutral fuels and carbon neutral fuels doesn't today have anything to do with nuclear but through that that that world I was interested in I did learn about um synthetic fuels because a lot of people in the nuclear space are saying well we have a huge source of energy here you need energy to make alternative fuels maybe there's a a tie in there and
I thought oh synthetic fuels what's that um and and that was through YouTube actually I just was watching videos on YouTube that I found interesting and and there were some fantastic videos about Thorium and modern salt reactors and I just captivated I watched hundreds of hours and um that filled my brain up with with knowledge does that count as research I think it totally counts as research like you've invested time into like learning more about something and yeah I
think it does you know the Hollywood picture of what a researcher looks like might be like test tubes books stacks of books papers everywhere and and you know the picture of a modern researcher could be learning with the vast amount of knowledge on the internet and then going into real world talking to experts talking to other people with experiences and learning that way I think is also valuable yeah I would agree you also have to be critical about how you how you choose your yeah tutor yeah of
course yeah I work in research so I my list of research projects is really long I have a lot shorter list of sort of academic research projects I looked at batteries also our undergrad research project and our final year research project yeah there was actually quite a lot of little research projects in undergrad like I did one on like biofuels as a as a poster project had to understand a few academic articles and then create a post on that also did one about nuclear and
something in nuclear industry you know I think it depends on the course because like our University is quite research focused yeah I think for like engineering mod if you're doing engineering course there's a lot more like practical and group work and research projects that you would have to do because when you go into the real world that's what you're working on your working on projects would you say the research project modules were your favorites they were the hardest
really I thought they were more fun than like some of the some of the straight like learn about thermodynamics I found that difficult oh yeah is hard but it's hard for everyone I think was like the research I just remember the design project and it just being like some of the longest days of my life oh yeah but I think that's the beauty of University and that there is an awful lot of breadth that you get to cover and sometimes especially in undergrad it can be a sort
of it's a detailed but it's still a surface level of understanding and then it's whether you choose to take that forward it's like you have Jasmine into further academic research or you choose to take that into a commercial setting like Wireless is done so it gives you that opportunity so if researchers you think that's Grand if it's not it's going to last for a short amount of time you'll learn a load of things and then you can go and do something you might prefer yeah exactly yeah I'd agree I
think the other thing about University is it it is important whilst you're studying that you understand what you're studying but it's also an opportunity to learn how to study because a lot of things when you're when you start working won't necessarily be on what you studied or because it's like Sophie said just a surface level you don't have to dive really deep and you're like I have to learn this and I don't have a lecture anymore now if I'm these good research
skills really come in handy yes it's true and I think that whilst I loved a lot of modules that we did at University some of the most useful ones was I can't quite remember what it was called but it was something like additional skills and it was an entire module that we had which it taught you how to write your CV it spoke to you about your interview techniques it was it was basically like life skills and that was part of our degree module so it was it's not quite a
pass fail but it was a compulsory unit and at the time I think we were doing it maybe in second year so that if you were applying for a graduate job you'd done the module um and at the time it was uh I don't really understand why this is relevant but when you get to the point of doing all of those things you think that's that's really awesome because it's helped me along the way so I would maybe look into whether your University does that as well because I found that really
valuable yeah that was really true I I so I co-supervised MSC students and some funnier students on the projects and I find it really interesting just like their journey through learning research skills because they kind of like start off like kind of knowing what they're doing but then by the end they're like they're really confident in like their independent research skills so I find it really interesting just seeing that what's the word development development yeah that's the word someone
is asking if it's smart to go straight into a masters if they know exactly what they want to do or is it better to do a bachelor's and then pick your Masters afterwards yeah I started a man's Computing and then I failed maths in the first year and um had to reset maths uh during the summer holidays and I failed my reset and I got uh kicked out and and I had to then reset all my exams the following year finally passed that time and I got back in but I was downgraded to the B Eng
um so I I walked away from University with a B engine on image um but it doesn't really answer the question but it was an interesting uh just life story that um you know if I I I I I got top grades in in secondary school and what I found quite challenging was I got into imperial which is one of the top universities and I went from being this in the top at the top of the class in my secondary school to being quite close to the bottom Imperial and I found that quite
challenging and um there's a bit of an aside but uh if you stick at it you know I I managed to pass my maths and I managed to get my degree and everything but that yeah as to whether you choose a Masters or a bachelor's I guess um if if you're if you're certain about what you want to do um and you're happy to commit the time then I guess getting a masters is good but if you are not sure where you want to go then I guess doing the bachelor's first does give you that flexibility
correct me if I'm wrong if you're doing a masters can you decide halfway through to do a Bachelors yeah of course you can you can like swap down also to add on like what are your reasons for wanting to do a masters because for most jobs like a bachelor's is perfectly fine you only really want to do a masters either if there's a specific job that you want and that requires you to have like some kind of postgraduate education or you're just like really interested in learning
more into a certain area there was only on the reasons I know people to do msc's based on the embassy students that I've co-supervised there's also the option of um of doing a year in industry or a year abroad which are some really fantastic things that you can do and some of those count towards your Masters some of them don't um so it's definitely worth looking at each specific University yeah before we move on to another question just to add to the Masters or bachelor's debate
there is a slight difference between integrated Masters and an MSC it's the difference is three months of study but it results in a different qualification the image is only really recognized in the UK other countries don't really recognize it as a masters it's a bachelor's University cannot be a masters so we're going to talk about what would we do differently would you change what you've done to get to where you are me personally uh no it's pointless having regrets in life I'm
always a forward thinker so I wouldn't change anything I wouldn't change anything but I would definitely have done a bit more interrogation into Apprentice ships and what life outside of University might have looked like um I think there's a lot of opportunities there in terms of going out and working and seeing like firsthand almost what what those what you could do so I think that's quite an exciting prospect but no I wouldn't change anything I know about you
anything you would do differently I didn't always get where I wanted to go the first time but um equally I think if I went back I'd probably still have wanted to explore that option so you know in that sense I learned something on the journey so no I I also wouldn't really uh change much so none of us would change anything I guess we just have positive outlook that's true whilst we didn't want to change anything would there be advice you would give to your
past self a bit of concrete advice would be just have a look at LinkedIn that is sort of the best place where you're going to find out about future jobs future connections um if you can view it as a sort of digital CV so anything that you do share it because you can always come back to it in a few years and think oh I'm really proud of that or you know and it's a good reference point so that would be a bit of practical advice I'd say so um sign up to that and then outside of that I would just
it's really hard when you're looking at your A Levels I would personally just as an aside say the aid levels are the hardest things I've ever done once you get to UNI I did find it easier so if you can stick in there honestly you will get through it um but just try not to take it too seriously I would say it's do your best and try your hardest but things will work out okay yeah I Echo that I really totally agree for me I think some advice to my former self would be about
maintaining relationships and building up relationships because life is all about relationships and and getting jobs is about that and I I was quite shy when I was younger and I I I didn't maintain relationships over time so I'm not in touch with anyone from that I went to University with for example and I I I'm much better at it now and I've actually read books on like how to win friends and influence people and and things like that and I've worked at being more charismatic and
um becoming less shy and things like that and I think those soft skills people often Overlook and they're quite important because being likable in a job interview is quite important because you're more likely to get the job if they're in answer your you know resonates with you and that can be as simple as just asking them about them and their interests and taking a genuine interest in them and so yeah I would have said to my former self try and try and learn uh people skills and those
soft skills and and don't overlook them yeah my advice was just not everyone else has the answers so it's okay to ask other people but also not feel too pressured if you don't have the answer immediately I think there's a lot of you know because we go through schooling with uh answer every question make sure you tick every box in the exam but in life um everyone's just kind of trying to work it out um you don't have to pretend like you know everything and be comfortable with that be
comfortable that you don't know everything and there's probably a way that you can learn um and yeah like Alistair says relationships are really important for that as well so we've talked a lot about our different experiences why we chose what we studied at University what impact it's had on what we do today and what we would have changed if anything and we didn't want to change anything so um thank you very much for listening and we hope to speak to you in another
episode yeah thanks everyone thank you thank you the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]