Iain Sword
[Image Description]: Iain Sword hangs off the side of a vertical rock face, wearing mountaineering equipment, including a helmet and multiple carabiners with hanging ropes.
[Image Description]: Iain Sword, a material scientist and engineer, looks through a piece of heavy technology at a piece of metal.
[Image Description]: Iain Sword smiles at the camera while on the side of a snowy mountain, wearing a mountaineering helmet, goggles, and a heavy winter jacket.
Meet Iain Sword, a PhD student in engineering and material science.
About 10-15 years ago, I was diagnosed with autism, and then cystic fibrosis about a year ago. I’m one of the very few people to have a late diagnosis of that: the genetic combination that I have wasn’t discovered until recently. A family member was diagnosed, and it made sense for me to get tested because a lot of the common symptoms line up with things that happened when I was younger. I’ve also broken my spine in 6 places. Life is a bit chaotic, and it's been a heck of a roller coaster from day one. But, I'm still here!
Tell us about your STEM?
I'm an engineer by training, my PhD is in welding and material science. I started off on aerospace engineering and decided there was too much maths. I liked working with metal, so I switched to that. Welding engineering is complicated: it’s really material science. I do a lot of lab work, testing tensile and impact strength. I'm also slowly working up to becoming a mountaineering instructor. I started on that path a couple of years ago. There's been a few hiccups with the PhD life - I had, and recovered from, a spinal injury.
What excites you about your field?
I love making things. I have always loved making things since I was a kid. It was Lego and Mecano, when I was younger. In my undergrad program, we had a couple of modules in the labs with technicians, and in one of them we were taught basic manufacturing processes that teach how metal work is done. We’d done some woodworking in school, but metal is fundamentally different. They gave us part of a car, and we had to cut it apart and see what it was made of and do basic analyses of it and see why it’s been designed this way. It was all about making things.
I've been in the engineering space the entirety of my career. There's so little room for interpretation in engineering, especially in material science and mechanics. It either works or it doesn't.
What accessibility tools support you in your field?
In terms of tools… (my supervisors don't know that I've done this!), but there’s days when I have very little lab work to do, and I’ll go do my writing while I’m at the climbing wall. I take my laptop and switch between the two. I'll go climb an hour, and then just bounce between the two. And that's a really good use of the day. Climbing and getting fresh air are the biggest things for me.
What accessibility tools do you wish existed?
What do I wish? That's a big one. Because my disabilities are managed, it’s less important for me now, but having these things when I was growing up would have been better. And it would have helped me work through my internalised ableism. Going through the schooling system in the UK, I did receive a diagnosis, but the teachers didn’t really understand. Having a support system outside my family, or having friends who had similar conditions would have been really beneficial. Just having that shared experience of dealing with something that makes it really hard to get out of bed in the morning.
What advice would you give to people starting their journey in STEM?
It's okay to get out. A lot of people feel locked into a path, and that they can’t get out. But I’m sure you’ve heard people say they want to get out of postgrad work and start a bakery. You can go in, and it can be something that you’re incredibly good at, but it might not be the right thing for you. That’s the lesson I’ve learned.
There’s been subfields of engineering that I have tried, for example, in my first couple of years. I really liked fluid mechanics. But I got to the second and third year classes, which were admittedly quite hard ones. It was something I was quite good at, and that I enjoyed. But I got to a point where I realized it no longer met my expectations, it was no longer what I expected it to be. That can happen at any point. It’s entirely reasonable to step back, and there is absolutely no shame in getting out. You can come back at any time, you build up transferable skills.
That's another thing: the transferable skills. The analytic process, the problem solving, all of that is applicable to so much of life. We need people with those skills in other fields.
How do you navigate the accessibility of outdoor activities?
I’m interested in supporting accessibility in outdoor pursuits. I joined the university mountaineering club and got into rock climbing. I got good at that, and started doing actual mountaineering. I'd go and climb up routes on the side of the mountains rather than just small rock faces or indoors. And then someone decided it'd be a good idea to take me winter climbing, which is a scary thing. In Scotland, it’s weird and wacky and wonderful. It just fills me with energy. It works for my autism. It just clicks. I’m the same in the lab. If I have things to make, and it makes sense, then my brain just clicks.
I'm probably gonna fall off a cliff and die at some point - I'd rather go out that way than in hospital. It's quite morbid, but I've thought about it quite a lot. And that's another thing: thinking about death is very natural for people with disabilities. And it's okay. Cystic fibrosis has a life expectancy of 25. I’m 26. My genetic combination has a higher life expectancy, but that's with treatment. When I was diagnosed, I went from having a long term mindset, to having a short term mindset, to having a medium-term mindset in the space of 6 months. But once my drugs kicked in, I realized that I have the capability to live quite a long, happy life with certain limitations.
