Technical Support Review

My placement year was positive because I was given full responsibility compared to that of a normal employee, and was exposed to a true experience of working in a world renowned pharmaceutical company. However there was little to no use of my academic knowledge of chemical engineering during my placement year.

I felt valued by my team, being treated equally and given an equal amount of the workload. Everyone I worked with was very friendly and helpful if I had any questions, and my manager and others in my team were always very supportive and assisted me in learning how to complete certain tasks.

I had one meeting at the beginning of the year with my manager, where we discussed the sort of things I would be working on. However I was not assigned a mentor, and because my manager was often very busy I didn't receive a great deal of support from them. However if I did ever have any queries or issues my manager was always happy to help.

For the first ~2 months of placement I did not have much to do, and would often have a lot of time where I had nothing to do. However for the rest of the time I had a sufficient amount of work but was not overworked. This could not easily be avoided due to the nature of my work, in that a lot of what I did was supporting when something went wrong in production.

This is one of the areas in which I am happiest with the placement. I feel that my role was equal to any other colleague in my team. When I started there were five of us in the technical support role. However, due to a number of reasons, for the last six months of my placement it was myself and one other in my team. Therefore I was given full responsibility in my placement, which I am very happy about.

Although I had a lot of responsibility in my role, very little of what I did had any relevance to my area of study. The main skills I required was being able to apply problem solving and initiative to a situation. Therefore the experience has not assisted my academic knowledge in any way really. However I feel that it will have helped considerably in teamworking and presenting, which will be useful when returning to university. Also my experience of what it's like to work in a company of this scale will be indispensable.

The first six months of my placement were spent in a portakabin with 10 others. In here the atmosphere was very relaxed and friendly, with everyone treating each other like friends more than colleagues. I then moved to the technical support office for the second six months of my placement. Here it was a more formal atmosphere, but everyone is still very relaxed and friendly, with a very positive atmosphere.

I would say that the placement wasn't particularly well set up. A week before I started, I had not received any communications on details of what time I should arrive, the dress code etc. I ended up emailing my manager to ask, and when I did I found out that she was no longer going to be my manager. When I arrived, I was not able to do anything because my induction wasn't until the next week. So the first week I didn't have anything to do. And I didn't have a login set up yet, so couldn't go on a computer. The placement student I was replacing had organised all my training though, which was very helpful. During my placement, I should have been assigned a mentor and a buddy. However my manager changed again once I started, and the person who was meant to be my mentor became my manager, and I was never assigned a buddy. I therefore didn't have either a buddy or a mentor. However my team was very approachable, so I could ask them any questions I needed to.

Although I was given a large amount of responsibility within my placement, I don't feel the company invested in me. I was given one project during my placement, and it was completely irrelevant to my academic background, and I feel it provided little area for development. Much of what I did was routine day-to-day work, which didn't offer much development. I did learn a lot about how to work in this kind of industry, however I don't feel that much effort was made to optimise my development by the company.

There are a number of future employment opportunities within the organisation. There is a graduate scheme that provides great potential for rapid progression, as well as the opportunity to apply for roles as a graduate. Within technical support at my site there were two graduate engineers, and several others throughout the site.

My team were very sociable, and always keen to go out for dinners. We went out roughly every month as a team. The other placement students were quite sociable, but not compared to other sites. At other sites there is a social rep that organises frequent social events, however this wasn't the case at my site. So we went out as a group once every one to two months.

I lived in Brighton during my placement, so the living costs were quite expensive. But if you lived in the same town as the site, the costs were quite reasonable. The cost of socialising was also quite expensive in Brighton, but there are places around that are cheaper.

In Brighton there is a lot going on. There are a vast number of clubs and bars, and lots of buses that run late into the night. Worthing has less to offer in terms of nightlife, but there are still a few good bars and pubs that provide a decent night out.

The placement students have a five a side football match every week, which we did throughout the year. There are also plenty of sports facilities around that offer everything you need. There are also lots of sights to see and places to go shopping around, and London is only an hour away on the train.