Alex was voted the winner of Health Zone in 2014. Here he reports back on using his £500 prize money to reach his target of visiting ten schools and talk about his engineering career.

If you’re an engineer who’d like funding to support your own STEM outreach activities, apply now for I’m an Engineer, Get me out of here at imanengineer.org.uk/engineers

I really enjoyed talking part in I’m an Engineer and liked interacting with students, sharing my journey I became a bioengineer, and dispelling myths about how clever you need to be to be an engineer.

As soon as I finished, I was inspired to get out from behind the keyboard and go give a series of talks in person at different schools in the UK. To do this I first became a STEM Ambassador which enabled me to talk at secondary schools.

I bought a two-year subscription to a very good presentation software called Prezi and built an interactive talk up about my journey entitled ‘From Legos to Stem Cells’. I then went out around the country and gave 10 talks at different schools, speaking to 250+ pupils in total. One of which was my old school, who wrote about my visit here.

I have since moved to the US and part of my role sees me visit research institutions and frequently present to classes of undergraduate engineers and scientists and discuss with them the benefits of postgraduate study and careers in biomedical engineering.