When he’s not designing high performance cars, he’s often out riding his track bike and when he finds the time, he runs a website and a podcast series called Dyslexia Life Hacks, which he talks about in his interview.

Matthew’s career has taken a different pathway of sorts; he finished college at 19 with a BTEC National Diploma and went to work as an HGV technician for Volvo trucks. When at 26 he felt like a change of direction, he applied to the MEng in mechanical and electrical engineering at RGU. During his time at RGU him and his team competed in the annual MATE ROV (underwater robotics) competition in the US and came home with three awards.

After graduating from RGU, Matthew was accepted onto a two-year graduate scheme at Siemens but felt that his heart lay in design engineering so he took a job with Triumph Motorcycles.

After three years he was made redundant and whilst out of work, he put some of his time to good use setting up his website Dyslexia Life Hacks, something he’d be thinking about for some time. After six months, he accepted a job as a senior vehicle design engineer with RML group, a leading high performance automotive engineering company, working on high performance cars. 

He’s currently working on a project to painstakingly (his words!) recreate a 1960’s Le Mans winning car from the ground up, mainly using photos from reference cars and a list of its scan data. He tells us that bringing a car like this into the modern day, complying with current safety regulations and making adjustments to accommodate the average human’s size and shape which has changed since the 60s, is a challenging feat of engineering.

He has kindly filmed this interview for Dyslexia Week to share his educational journey since being statemented with dyslexia at the age of six. He is now the creator of a clever resource called Dyslexia Life Hacks, a website he built after being made redundant a couple of years ago, where he shares simple everyday hacks for managing dyslexia. Visitors to the website can also submit their own hacks. More recently, he has created a podcast where he interviews people about their experiences with dyslexia.

As ever, we ask our alumni to share their wisdom with our community and our future alumni. We asked Matthew what advice he’d share with anyone who may be on an unconventional career path.  Matthew tells us, “Keep going, your unconventional path feeds into your knowledge and experience and comes out in the things you create. Having an unconventional career path also allows you to have an alternative view on how the world works, which can be really useful when building a diverse team. There's nothing wrong with doing things differently to what everybody expects and actually, sometimes it can be an advantage.”

Find out more about Matthew's Dyslexia Life Hacks

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