Commercial Review

I really enjoyed my year at GSK, it allowed me to network with a lot of people. I was given enough support at the start of my placement to allow me to build on my skills quickly. I also got given a lot of responsibility through out the year and had numerous projects to work on.

I felt very valued - especially in my team. In the wider organisation, I don't think everyone knows or values what work the placement students do. My team was particularly good at giving me meaningful projects and gave me work in which I could see through to the end of my year. I got a lot of positive feedback on how my work has valued the organisation.

We had a lot of 1:1's in place to ensure that I felt I was given enough support. We had one document in which we had to fill in, to go through my objectives and what I wanted to achieve in the year. I felt very supported through out my year and felt as though I could go to my manager if I felt too stretched or if I didn't have enough challenging projects.

My workload varied a lot through out the year due to different project end dates. I would say looking back, I probably could have dealt with a bit more work on a day to day basis. I feel this would have pushed me a little more. In saying that, I had some parts of the year where I felt like I had too much work. It is important to have open and honest conversations with managers so they know.

Many of my projects I was assigned through out the year, gave me a lot of responsibility. However, at the start of my placement I was supporting projects a lot more than running them. I could see a big difference in my second half of the year, when I was given much more responsibility.

I gained a lot of confidence in my placement year and learnt how to communicate with people of different levels in the business. I received a lot of training in areas such as Negotiating, Presenting and Commercial Finances. I also became a lot more competent in Microsoft Office and other similar programmes.

The office atmosphere was great, particularly when there were internal launches, a real buzz was created round the office and you could tell that everyone was proud of the brands and products. It was a very social office environment which was partially down to the hot desking - each day you would be sat by someone different.

It was well organised. I received my contract fairly quick and received good communications before I started. During my placement, it was clear who I had to contact for what e.g. pay, holiday and sickness. There was also a lot of social opportunities for placement students and the organisation did well at setting this up and putting us all in contact.

Very appealing, there are different graduate schemes available dependent on what path you want to take. They also encourage you to apply for direct entry roles after you graduate. The programmes are however extremely competitive so you are not guaranteed anything after you finish your placement unlike some companies. I feel they could do more to hold on to placement talent.

The social scene was one of the biggest highlights for me of my placement year. It allowed me to meet a vast array of people and I have made lots of friends. There are many placement students at GSK so you will most probably be working with some with in your business area. It is nice to have people in the same boat as you.

Brentford itself, is cheaper than most parts of London however there is very little to do there. Because of this, we went into central London a lot which was very expensive. The housing was also expensive compared to most other places in the UK - even not being central. Nights out and socialising in general turned out to be where most of my money went after rent.

The nightlife in Brentford was fairly poor, there was a couple of pubs in the area (The Globe). But other than this, it lacked much nightlife at all. You didn't need to travel too far to find good places though and there are very good transport links into central London. We tended to go out a lot in Clapham as oppose to anywhere around Brentford.