What Purpose Lab Taught a Science Student About the World Outside the Lab

Science trains you to be precise. You form a hypothesis, test it, and follow the data. What it does not always prepare you for is sitting in a room with people from industries you have never thought about and realising your assumptions about the world are far narrower than you thought. 

That has been the unexpected gift of being a Purpose Lab student ambassador. 

Over almost six months, I have engaged with organisations spanning finance, housing, law, transport, heritage, horticulture and healthcare, among others. Crowe UK, Northern Railway, Legal & General, Karbon Homes, Clyde & Co, the Royal Horticultural Society, the NHS and several more. As a science student, the NHS felt like familiar territory, but even that session offered angles I had not considered, and the rest were sectors I rarely think about at all. That breadth is precisely what made the experience valuable. 

Social mobility is a good example of how my thinking has shifted. After leaving a student union role, it had drifted off my radar. It felt like someone else's conversation. Purpose Lab put it back in front of me, not abstractly, but through real organisations talking honestly about access, opportunity and barriers. I now think about it when considering my own future, which is something I genuinely did not expect to say. 

What has also stayed with me is what happens when people from different backgrounds sit under a common topic. The perspectives that surface, the angles you would never arrive at alone, the habit of actually listening rather than just waiting to speak. That has changed how I engage with people, not just professionally but generally. 

Purpose Lab has not just broadened my knowledge. It has made me more curious about the world beyond my discipline, and for a scientist, that might be the most useful thing of all. 

Seun Seidu – Purpose Lab Student Ambassador and Sheffield Hallam University student