Industrial Placement Student Review

I have enjoyed my work placement - particularly the labwork and chance to work independently. The start of placement is less enjoyable as up until Christmas there is little to no project work (lots of training and literature searches). I have also had my project change several times. On the whole everyone has been welcoming and helpful though.

I was made to feel that the work I was doing was important and people were happy to help me out when needed, but I didn't socialise much with my team (eg. team drinks or lunches). I felt a little bit isolated from the general office since everyone already knew eachother and we didn't have much in common.

My supervisor offered me a lot of practical assistance when learning new techniques but was afterwards happy to leave me to it. She filled out university feedback forms promptly and discussed my progress and goals with me. However, she had limited experience with mass spec so was less engaged with the work I was doing on mass spec method development for my project for which I sought out other people both from my team and the BIB department.

My schedule varied widely between not particularly busy on office-work days (as I only have one project there is little paperwork and write-up to do) to extremely busy and often working overtime on days involving labwork whether for cell treatments or mass spec sample prep. I was increasingly busy towards the end of the year. This was not an ideal balance.

I was given quite a lot of responsibility for my own work though as I had no experience with mass spec prior to working here it was generally in conjunction with others' suggestions and technical assistance. I was also responsible for general lab tasks (eg. submitting pipettes for servicing) and some important data checking for other projects.

I have improved my independence enormously and, to a lesser extent, my time management and teamwork skills. These will be helpful in work environments in the future. I have also developed key lab and technical skills which I hope to use in a future lab-based career.

It was generally quiet - I didn't socialise very much with my team beyond the IP students and those I directly worked with. It was quite friendly if you did talk to people, but despite the hot-desking people tended to sit at the same desks near the same people every day.

The organisation prior to Christmas was not fantastic - following my online training and literature search I had very little to do as the project itself was scheduled to start in the new year. This meant I was frequently left with nothing to do. Later, the organisation was better but unforeseen difficulties with the method meant my project was revised several times.

I have enjoyed working for GSK and would consider a job here in future - however, their FLP graduate schemes based in R&D require a Masters or PhD to apply for them so there are no options for a graduate scheme following my graduation next year except perhaps direct entry.

The IPs on site (about 15 of us) generally got on well - in particular 5 or 6 of us met up regularly for pub quizzes, movies and nights out as well as at work. A few R&D IPs also made friends with GMS IPs from the other local site.

My placement was based near London so quite expensive but okay as we were paid well. The main problem was the lack of appropriate housing nearby which meant either high prices and/or getting a car. Accessibility was also poor - due to the lack of local facilities you had to get a train or Uber or drive everywhere for activities like shopping or nights out which added up to be quite expensive.

Very very poor. The only nightclub was a town over (and not very good) and the trains back from London stopped running between 11.45 and 6.45 so you could not go out in London easily. There are a lot of pubs and bars nearby though and weekly pub quizzes for week nights.

The team didn't do much together outside of work apart from the occasional leaving or Christmas drinks. There were opportunities to do extracurricular activities at work including visiting other sites/departments and the STEM Ambassador work like the Big Bang Fair and helping at work experience days which I was quite heavily involved in with several other IPs.