STAX R&D Process Engineering Placement Student Review

The role involved many projects and opportunities to gain varying soft and technical skills which I found beneficial. Colleagues were very friendly and helpful and the culture was generally relaxed and a nice working atmosphere was present.

I felt very valued as I was treated as another member of the team and not just a placement student and in some instances given responsibilities similar to the level of a permanent full time graduate employee.

My primary team and the wider site team were very supportive in assisting me with the projects I had to do by way of providing adequate guidance, wisdom, knowledge and support where required. One thing I would say is that sometimes it was hard to access team documents in terms of knowing exactly where to look for it and which documents were the most recent due to a number of duplicates. The team did however highlight a need for better data management and are working towards accomplishing this.

I had up to at least 3 projects at any one time that I was either in charge of or playing a major role in so I always had something to do to occupy my time.

I was given a lot of responsibility, in particlular managing the operations and logistics for the whole pilot plant line for my team and managing a >£100, 000 capital project involving many complex project and people management needs.

I would say the skills I developed from this placement will help me mostly with applying to jobs in the future as opposed to me degree specifically due to skills I have developed such as project engineering, operations and logistical management, team work, presentational skills etc.

Very friendly. I enjoyed working with my colleagues who were always down for general chit chat and life advice and had many laughs whilst working.

The organisation was generally good. I had set projects to take on which were evaluated half way through the year to see if it was still feasible for me to do them given the COVID 19 situation and amended as required. There was also a student project which allowed for communication and networking with the other students especially during COVID.

There was lots of training available to me and all colleagues via the companies vast learning platform. My team also tried to give me projects and work that would benefit my future career development.

Within R&D there are no guaranteed Grad roles so potentially no jobs prospects for me within this same division, however people can be called back when roles open within teams. There are also job prospects in other functions of the business that offer valuable experience for a chemical engineering student like myself such as supply chain.

I wasn't really involved in this as I lived separately to other placement students and liked being on my own more. However, the students who did live together did enjoy living together and enjoyed events together where COVID didn't obscure them. Due to the pandemic there wasn't much of a physical social scene but I enjoyed zoom team meetings and wider quarterly team meetings where we played games etc.

The cost of living depends on the type of accommodation you find and can range from about £400/month for shared accommodation to £700+ for solo apartments/studios/flats. The area is well equipped with a variety of supermarkets and transportation is not too bad either with locally operating buses.

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Yes we were encouraged to do sporting events for charity together as teams etc.