“I work at National Grid, where we delivery electricity and gas to homes and businesses across New England. I have a degree in electrical engineering along with an MBA, and at National Grid I have worked in a handful of departments, such as Transmission Planning, Emergency Planning, and Sustainability (where I work now!).”

“I’m a community architect and strategist meaning that it’s my job to build digital environments where groups of people come together to learn, share, and collaborate on all sorts of topics. Students use these online environments all the time in places like Stack Overflow, Reddit, gaming forums, and even parts of Facebook.

Building a successful digital environment requires a lot of understanding of how people behave, what drives us to do what we do, and how design impacts behavior. Once we’re up and running, I use a ton of math to understand what community users are doing and if I can improve the experience by making design or functionality changes. Often times my work dives into big data and predictive analytics – especially if we’re trying to figure out what’s going to happen before it even happens. My job even requires dealing with hackers, spam bots, real life trolls, and all sorts of crazy unwelcome behavior that people like me have to stop so our community users don’t feel unwelcome or attacked.

In order to do the job I do, I have to be equal parts communicator, coder, artist, psychologist, and data nerd. It’s an interesting job packed to the brim with STEM aspects, but also a lot of attributes that we don’t usually think of when we picture someone who works in STEM.”

“I’m a scientist at Philips Research in Cambridge, MA, working on making difficult procedures easier for surgeons! I work in the Image Guided Therapy group here, so the projects I’m involved with center around medical procedures that use some kind of image guidance. The main project I’m involved in right now focuses on providing guidance (e.g., with X-ray images acquired during the procedure) in performing small lung lesion biopsies in order to help in the early detection of lung cancer. I’m also involved with a project that revolves around generating intellectual property or patents which involves brainstorming with experts in the field, identifying problems, and coming up with solutions that are unique or patentable.”

“My name is Tsega and I currently work for Microsoft in the retail sales. I have been working for Microsoft for about two years now. I went to school at Northeastern University for Criminal Justice and Psychology and minor in Computer Science, after graduating from Boston College High school for High School. As a student who went through the Boston Public Schools system up to 8th grade, I have always wished for such an opportunity where STEAM was something I was able to partake in because it’s such a valuable thing in life especially for young adults. That’s why I have taken it upon myself to be part of Mass STEM HUB and help in any way I can. That way I am at least playing a roll in providing what I never had to the generation that’s coming up and help them in ways I wish I was helped and guided.”