Nicole Meek

"I think the Coordinator personality type fits my work really well. I work with lots of different people and often act as a go-between so I have to be good at communicating and making people happy. "

"I organise STEM activity sessions in schools. I communicate with teachers to advertise our free and paid programmes so I have to have good written and verbal communication skills. I also manage our charity's online learning platform, which is where students can log on and take part in our activities from home. I love feeling like I'm making a difference to students - some of the schools we work with are in very deprived areas so offering free resources and activities to these schools feels really good. I also love being organised which is very important in my job. The starting salary for my role is £20,000-£25,000."

"I graduated with a Biology degree from university and had just started studying for a PhD when I realised that my interest lay in encouraging others into STEM, especially girls. I think this started at university - every year we invited local primary school students in for exciting activity days. I volunteered to help a few times and loved it! I left university and spent several months volunteering and trying to build up my skills at the Wildlife Trust, the Big Bang Fair and a primary school. I worked at a secondary school helping GCSE students with Biology and Chemistry but I knew I didn't want to be a teacher and that I needed to build up my project-management skills so I created an after-school science club. From that, I got my next job working on the National Citizen Service (NCS) which was great and really helped me to develop lots of skills and confidence. "

"I love reading and playing video games in my spare time. "

"On a typical day, I spend a lot of time emailing teachers and school contacts getting our STEM activity events booked in. Right now, I am working on a project where we have funding from a company to run 3 physics activity days at secondary schools. To start with, I research what schools we already work with who might fit the criteria and also look at new schools who we might be able to link with. I use a website called Canva to create marketing materials specific to the project to send to schools. Once I have schools interested, I need to gather data from them and book them in on our system. The bigger picture here is that the charity I work for gets funds to continue working and also almost 300 students get to take part in a fun STEM activity day for free."

"A Level Biology, Mathematics, ChemistryBSc BiologyMSc Biomedical Research"