We are eating noodles in the sunshine at Imperial College, London, when my former student tells me about his invention. “Meet SAM,” says Joachim and places his prototypes on the bench – a tiny switch and actuator that will allow everyone to make wireless smart things without knowing anything about coding or electronics. A jacket that heats up when your body temperature drops, a fridge that warns you’re out of milk – it’s an Internet of Things idea and the applications seem endless once you start connecting people and objects. While Joachim answers my questions about how he and his team will manage the journey from inspiration to execution, I’m reminded of another conversation we once had about risk.

It was inspired by a story about an assassin in the murderous heat of a noonday piazza – one of those ambitious narratives whose success depends entirely upon managing uncertainty. For I am a novelist and Joachim is a mechanical engineer who took my creative writing class as part of his degree, and he outlines his business plan with the same passion and precision as he wrote that short story.

For the past three years I have taught creative writing to students in science, technology, engineering and medicine at Imperial who can take humanities options for credit. It was the interdisciplinary challenge that intrigued me, but I’ll admit to being sceptical about the students’ writing potential. So I was delighted to be proved wrong: their writing is easily as good – and often better – than that of creative writing students I have taught elsewhere, including at the University of East Anglia. And my external assessors – also writers who teach and hold PhDs from UEA – agree.

“I hate the perception that scientists and engineers struggle with any arts subject,” says my student Chris Winchurch (electrical engineering). Most of these AAA/A*A*A* undergrads at the world’s second-ranked university abandoned formal humanities at 16, so creative writing is a grade gamble. But they are eager to explore their potential and to resolve a certain tension between their artistic and scientific interests.

On the first day we rearrange the furniture. Stem students (science, technology, engineering and maths) spend their days in labs and lecture theatres and this is very often the first time they sit face-to-face to discuss ideas and peer review. Their communication skills need liberating, their critical vocabulary is underdeveloped. Farah Shair (biochemistry) tells me the first homework on character felt like “reaching inside my brain to find a part that hasn’t been used for so long”. Chris admits that it was “a lot harder than I anticipated to switch from modules with correct answers and rigid methodologies into a much more subtle and subjective world, but in the end it was the highlight of my week”.

We set sail with three rules: observe the world; read attentively; get black on white.

During the year of reading and writing and observing, students learn to tolerate uncertainty in process and outcome, embrace risk (creative, intellectual and performance) and practice humility – since writing is an exercise in failing better each time. Their writing is imaginative in theme and topic. They do not fall fatally in love with their work and will abandon experimental dead ends. Their killer work ethic sustains them through the endless revision that is essential to good writing.

Aifric Campbell: ‘Students do not fall fatally in love with their work.’ Photograph: Richard Saker/Guardian

“They are technically and creatively ambitious,” says Laura Fish, an external examiner for the course and senior lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria. “Inventive risk-takers who look at story and subvert,” adds playwright and fiction writer Laura Bridgeman, a moderator for the course who has taught creative writing at four different UK universities. They are interested in writing that will engage a reader – which makes them perfect raw material for workshops where work must always be placed ahead of ego.

Best of all, Imperial’s creative students are not obsessed with publication as an end goal. Like Junot Diaz‘s students at MIT, Imperial’s students are “not all trying to be novelists”. This makes them particularly exciting to teach, since they are completely absorbed in the creative process and spared the torment that afflicts so many students on creative writing degrees.

The debate about creative writing studies continually circles around this issue of publication, and distracts from the far more interesting question about its effect on intellectual and personal development. Stem students discover unexpected synergies between their scientific and artistic talents. Fanny Heneine (civil engineering) says she “produces more creative and well-thought solutions to engineering problems”. Alumnus Stuart Holland, now a software engineer, alternates between programming and creative writing projects to exercise “two different yet complementary forms of creative problem solving”. James Owen (biology) reflects on the potential for creative writing to engage the public in “what is current and exciting in science”.

As I write, Joachim and his team are well on the way from dream to execution: SAM Labs has ignited the technology press and smashed through its funding targets. According to Joachim, the “constant questioning and endless iterations” of his startup experience are very similar to creative writing.

“The most profound lesson I learned from creative writing studies was about the impact of science on society,” concludes Stefan Grossfurthner (biotechnology). A year of reading and writing fiction raises all sorts of ethical and moral questions that inspire Stem students to apply their talent for sceptical enquiry to an analysis of human behaviour.

And isn’t this precisely what we would all wish for our scientists, engineers, technologists and doctors – that the men and women who build, design, code, fix and shape our world are enriched by their exploration of our human condition?

Aifric Campbell’s third novel, On the Floor, is published by Serpent’s Tail