Industrial Placement Student Review

I cannot say it was a very enjoyable experience. It was rather unorganised. There was not a defined project so at the end of the year I feel like the jack of all traits but master of none. I felt more like a ''data monkey'' rather than an analyst/a scientist.

Although I disliked the ways of working, my team worked on technologies new to most members, therefore, any intellectual insight or observation was highly appreciated. It did take some time for me to be brave enough to start sharing my insights but I suppose this is the case for every newcomer.

I suppose that my supervisors helped me as much as they could from professional perspective but since the technologies we were evaluating were new to all of us it was more of a peer learning experience and it was not easy to learn. My progress and learning dependent entirely on how much I was pushing myself and often I felt like people from other departments were wanting to help me much more and that they also were interested much more in the science behind it than just extracting the direct benefits of the technology. Nevertheless, it was easy to express my concerns regarding workload to my supervisor and she really did help where she could.

It sometimes varies but usually quite busy. probably for over 50 % of the time I worked more than 9 until 5 days although sometimes I stayed to analyse some of the data myself and learn more about it. Obviously, more time had to be devoted while writing the final report too.

I would say quite a lot. My placement was highly collaborative, meaning I had to spend time with visiting external collaborators, communicate via email a lot. This has really help me to develop professional work practices and meet a lot of smart and encouraging people. I also was responsible for sample shipment and even trained a PhD student on cell culture.

I really doubt I will be coming back to bioprocess research. It was good practice to keep practicing cell culture although it is a very straightforward procedure and it was not anything sophisticated. Nevertheless, I did learn some things about mass spectrometry and multivariate analysis which I bet will be applicable to me in the future, especially if I decide to develop my career in the field of omics data. I would have loved to have been able to learn R programming too.

We were all sitting in an open plan office so it was easy to communicate, albeit hard to concentrate sometimes. We had a couple of team builds and it was a really good experience. There were some really helpful and supportive people and I can bravely say that I have made some really good friends here and also understood that age boundary does not matter when befriending a colleague.

Bad organisation. I guess since my supervisor was involved in 4 projects, so was I. The team/department itself is not very well organised and it was reflected in poor organisation of my placement. The width and amount of work I had to do was sometimes really overwhelming and I did not know where to even start at times.

The best thing was the ability to attend the Immunology Summit. As for learning about multivariate analysis, it was entirely up to me and I had to prove I really need some software to do independent analysis on my own. I felt it would have been very useful to visit and work with collaborators in a different site in Germany (I could have even taken out holiday) but this idea of mine was rather laughed at.

I suspect that working in a discovery performance unit would be much more exciting and science-oriented but I doubt I will be coming back to GSK. I would probably prefer a much smaller company or work in academia. I still want to pursue a PhD but I'd like it to be purely academic.

Absolutely. The IP unite organised many social events. We were really close to apprentices too. The IP unite organised a Christmas ball as well as a boat party in the river Thames. There are many PhD students, recent graduates and Future Leader programme participants in the company too. . .

I did not live near the town centre so it did cost quite a lot to get to the train station (Uber, since there are not many buses). I suggest getting a bike. Also Stevenage is a rather boring place but it has great connections to London and Cambridge. Although the town itself is not expensive.

Very poor. There is only one club (IP unite organised some nights out there). There is a number of pubs but they are not very exciting. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GSK organises ''Orange days'' where people volunteer, for example, we are going to be painting walls in a local school. There are many bake sales to raise money for charity and a lot of departments participate in marathons and similar activities with the purpose of raising money too.. . .