After Adam Martin graduated with his mechanical engineering degree from UAH last summer, he realized he wanted others to have the same opportunity he did to pursue his passion. So he did something about it. He founded the Alabama Future Technology Initiative, or AFuture, an outreach effort to increase interest in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields among public school high school students across the state. Each spring and fall, AFuture is offered from 12 to 5 p.m. for five consecutive Saturdays. For the first four, participants take part in hands-on experiments and receive college-level instruction on "every topic" relating to the STEM fields, he says. The fifth is set aside for a project open house, in which students to present a prepared research topic in the hopes of winning a scholarship prize. It's an approach Martin says he would have appreciated as a high school student himself. "I had no idea about mechanical engineering when I picked it and I still didn't know until two or three years later," he says. "It turned out to be perfect, but I thought about what I would have liked to have known and that's how I crafted the framework."