Every member gets a bespoke pathway: what they want to lead, the project that will stretch them and the fellow who will back them. The routes run into start-up leadership, management, project leadership and postgraduate research, and they are designed to be open to everyone, especially women in science.
Members move up by taking on more scope through stretch assignments. The top two rungs are one-year roles that change hands every October.
Each active window of the year offers an optional stretch assignment, sized to fit around study and work.
Practise the founder’s job before you have the title: setting direction, raising support, presenting to a board and owning outcomes. Our first President, Ali Masoudi, combines biomedical science with leading the club’s executive, the kind of preparation start-up leadership demands.
Officer and executive roles mean running meetings, budgets, deadlines and volunteers who do not report to you. It mirrors, on a small scale, the “big leap” that the CEO Genome study (ghSMART, reported in HBR) found in more than a third of the fastest-rising CEOs.
Own scope, schedule, risk and delivery on live energy and biotech projects, coached by fellows who have led integrated reservoir studies, field developments and asset evaluations worldwide.
Women are 27.2% of the UK’s core STEM workforce: close to half of science professionals, yet only one in nine engineering professionals [1]. The leak is long-standing. HBR’s Athena Factor research on US companies (2008) found women made up 41% of young science, engineering and technology talent, but more than half later left, with attrition peaking between the ages of 35 and 40 [2]. HBR has also shown that women tend to be mentored, while men get sponsored [3].
SYLC answers with structure, not slogans:
Our founding President is studying for an MSc in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Glasgow, and our academic fellow, Dr Roghaieh Parvizi, is a lecturer there and heads the meLab research group. Our Chairman is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University. Through them members get a realistic view of MSc and PhD research, supervisors and funding, and of how research becomes a company. These links run through individual fellows and members; SYLC has no formal partnership with the University.
The University backs that journey. It counts 22 spin-outs rated high or medium potential, with 190 jobs created across ten scalable ventures, and in 2024 it launched a £500,000 MedTech Innovation Fund to translate research into products (October 2024) [4].
Members practise the route from idea to funded venture on a sanitised or synthetic case, usually from July to September, ending with a mock investment board at Capstone Day. Live grant applications for Senergy ventures are never club assignments.
| Pathway | Suits | What you do in SYLC | Where it leads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder | Scientists and engineers with an idea | Validation, mock grant applications and board pitches on sanitised venture cases | Start-up CEO, spin-out founder |
| Industry leader | Graduates heading into energy or engineering | Officer portfolio, then executive; running people and budgets | Team leader, manager |
| Technical lead | Engineers, geoscientists, data scientists | Own a workstream on subsurface, AI or process projects | Project lead, technical lead |
| Researcher | Students considering an MSc or PhD | Research projects with academics, proposal and scholarship coaching | PhD, research careers, academic spin-outs |
| Policy & finance | Economics, law and finance students | Energy-transition analysis, fundraising, partnerships | Energy policy, ESG, venture and project finance |
Your application shapes your first project and your mentor match.
