Bioinformatics placement student Review

At the beginning of placement I felt slightly out of depth as I did not have much computational experiance and I was doing a bioinformatics placement. However once I became more confident in the work I was doing I felt that my overall experience in my placement improved. The main thing that made my placement so enjoyable was the friendly atmosphere and all the other young staff who I became close with.

Really valued. My manager awarded me an appreciation award half way through due to the work I was doing and I was able to see first hand from my colleages the impact of my work and they would also feed this back to me as well

To start with I was not given a huge amount of training, just resources to learn from. But there were many colleges in my team and in other teams who were willing to offer support if I was struggling with something.

It varied quite a bit depending if I had a presentation or report due. Most days I was able to finish on time, and there were the occasional days were I would have to stay a lot later to get the work done. This happened maybe once every 1/2 weeks?

I was given more as the placement went on. I am currently organising a training session for other staff which is really exciting.

Immensely! I have already got a job lined up for next year and I think my work at AstraZeneca played a major part in that. They asked a lot of questions and were really interested in hearing about my current role during the interviews. Doing a bioinformatics placement I got experience with a number of languages as well as the occasional time in the lab and the chance to learn about the science behind the data I was working with.

A really friendly atmosphere. You didn't have to dress up to smart which I liked. I felt relaxed at work.

My project was actually changed a few months in, due to unforeseen circumstances. However, this actually worked out for the best as I preferred the project I was moved to.

The company were happy to pay for to go to attend courses and online courses. I also got to go to a few conferences!

Not sure.

Yes there is a thing called AZinspire - designed for all the younger/new staff. They organise loads of activities and talks and this was how I met quite a few of my friends.

The cost of living was quite high as it was Cambridge. I lived slightly further out of the centre which made it considerably cheaper so I would recommend this to anyway doing the placement. Socialising and drink are also quite expensive (if you're not used to prices in the South!). This didn't stop us though!

Nightlife was not very good. However, we just learnt to adjust what we did compared to university. We went to pubs more often than clubs and would go over to each others houses instead of out in town.

There were but personally I didn't feel like I needed to do these as I had so much going on at work already. I did several things in Cambridge such as volunteer for Olio and Samaritans.