ADME Scientist Review

I really enjoyed my experience. It was nice to get a break from academia and get a good insight into life in industry. By doing the placement year, it has reassured me that I want to continue with work in industry instead of academia after university. There is a lot of freedom with my university project and it has been really enjoyable collaborating with so many groups on my project.

I was lucky enough to work in a really great team with a fantastic line manager. Everyone in the group was happy to help whenever I had a question whether it was to do with an experiment or someone different. My line manager pushed me to do my best and was easily approachable whenever I had any ideas or any issues.

Throughout my placement I had biweekly meetings in a 1:1 setting with my line manager where we would discuss issues around the data I collected or issues with regards to university and in particular sharing project info with the university. I also had help the project leader in designing the assay for my university project so senior leaders were also more than ahppy to help.

At the start of the placement, my days were very quiet and long because I was only able to do training modules and it took a while to be trained up on all the pieces of equipment. After 3 months though when I started working on my university project, I was finding myself becoming more busy and with the COVID-19 outbreak, we lost a couple of members due to childcare and so I had to take on a lot more work.

At the start of the placement, I didn't have a lot of responsibility because it took a while to get access to all the software and become authorised to do certain tasks but after a couple of months, I had a lot more responsibility and was working autonomously for the rest of the year.

During the placement, I gained lots of journal researching skills because I had to do a literature review and also with regards to my project, the theory behind it was pretty novel and so I had to do a lot of research to design and create bespoke assays. Also gained lots of experiencing with regards to presenting data in front of a group which will undoubtedly help with presentations skills for final year of university.

The atmosphere was very quiet before COVID-19n because a lot of the modellers and project leaders were on calls for most of the day but the atmosphere improved when only the lab based staff were in the office.

It was really easy to set up. The university did 90 % of everything on behalf so I only needed to fill out a couple of forms before starting

The company put a lot of time and resources into my project. The budget kept increasing as the project progressed and it was really nice to see the actual impact of the project for the department

I would happily work for this company again. There are a lot of perks if you work for them full time and there is a lot of flexibility in the job roles that you can choose from.

There wasn't much of a social scene. Cambridge is a very expensive city and a lot of people were very tired after a long day of work.

The cost of living in Cambridge is expensive which is expected and socialising is more of a pub culture than a clubbing culture which I preferred. I am too old to go clubbing now.

I didn't really care about the nightlife. Cambridge clubs are pretty poor but that didn't bother me because Cambridge has some of the best pubs.

One thing I did outside of work was Tuesday night football with other colleagues from AZ. It was nice to speak to and interact with colleagues based at different sites.