Associate Clinical Data Scientist Review

I really enjoyed my time here at GSK. The people in my department were very welcoming and made an effort to teach me whatever they could. The work was varied and generally interesting. I was given a lot of responsibility, and I also enjoyed visiting the various other GSK sites and networking with a variety of people.

I feel very valued by some of my colleagues. My manager and close colleagues are all very supportive and grateful for the help I give them. Other members of the department (in different roles) instead treat the placement students as "admin support" in their words, and I didn't ever feel like they understood the value of the work I was doing.

My manager gave excellent support. If there was a process she didn't understand or have experience of, she'd find out for me or point me in the direction of someone who could help. She went above and beyond to help me network, both with GSK staff members and people from other pharma companies. I always felt that she was very approachable, and was able to help me with non-GSK related issues.

I was exceptionally busy on a day-to-day basis. I generally worked at least 5-10 hours per week over my contracted hours. No pressure as such was put on me by my manager, but the whole department was greatly under-resourced and there just weren't the hours in the day to complete everything.

I was given my own clinical trial to work on as a Data Quality Lead. I feel that says it all! I was also asked to create documents for other data quality lead's studies, and often was the sole cover for my manager's studies whenever she was OOF on annual leave or sickness.

This year on placement has really developed my routine, and discipline. I hope this will translate well when I go back to university, as previously I've struggled getting into the revision mindset. I have a much greater knowledge of Microsoft word/excel now, and my understanding of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has been hugely developed.

Very mixed, as worked in a large open plan office. Some groups from other departments could be very noisy and obnoxious when it suited them, but were happy to report other departments (anonymously) when they felt they were being too loud. My department were lovely, and enjoyed socialising over coffees etc.

I don't think it was particularly well set up. The amount of irrelevant training I had to undertake when I joined, and a lot of the SOPs I read were very useless as were too high level for someone with no experience of data management. A lot of tasks had been earmarked for me before I had started, but some of these projects were pulled, and other pieces of work were deemed inappropriate.

I have gained lots of GSK specific data management knowledge. There were lots of opportunities to visit different sites and learn about departments that we interacted with, and also other parts of GSK such as consumer healthcare etc. There were lots of seminars and additional training sessions which I also attended.

I would love to come back to GSK, whether that is in Clinical Data Management or another department. GCDO have expressed an interest in retaining me for once I graduate, but I appreciate this is fully dependent on headcount, and as one of the most under-resourced departments in R&D, I'm not holding out too much hope. They also haven't recruited a graduate in about a decade, so some serious changes will have to be made to the training curriculum/buddy system.

No particularly. At Stevenage, most of the IP students are lab-based. For some reason or another, there was a big divide between the lab students and non-lab-based students. This didn't really bother me as I built good relationships with permanent members of staff, and enjoyed various lunches/evenings out with them.

Rent was fairly good, much better than I had initially anticipated. Value for money is another story though, as the only estate agents to offer house shares was very dodgy and there were a lot of issues with our house. Food and drink was to be as expected for living somewhere so close to London.

The nightlife was almost non-existent. No pubs local to where we were living, and the one "club" in Stevenage (Bar and Beyond) was beyond tragic. This wasn't an issue for me as wouldn't have been something to influence my placement choice anyway. There was a good range of restaurants (local and chain) which we went to instead.

Not really. I joined the gym when I moved to Stevenage as there was very little to do. My IP housemates and I took trips to London and Cambridge, and I think if I didn't have access to a car this year, life would have been very dull and a lot more expensive (buying train tickets to escape Stevenage all the time!)