In Vitro Electrophysiologist Review

I absolutely loved it. The staff are all friendly and welcoming, I felt that the work I was doing was contributing to the company greatly. I received great support from both my supervisor and my lab, people were always on hand to help me out. The site itself is also amazing, with a great canteen and discounted gym, all in a very leafy and green area of the country.

Very valued, although I was a cog in a very large pipeline, we had fortnightly meetings within our lab, with other labs and departments in different stages of the pipeline where I regularly gave presentations on my results, and discussed what to do next/try next time. In these meetings everyone (even senior staff) was friendly and eager to hear what I'd done, and I felt comfortable in asking questions and making suggestions

Excellent support, my supervisor was very rarely away from the lab and if he was he was always contactable via e-mail. I was given great training from all members of my lab who were always on-hand to help me out if I was having problems.

Very. But the pressure on me to get results came from me, sometimes experiments just wouldn't work or the results wouldn't be what was expected. It's hard to strike a perfect work balance in a lab because of the type of work, sometimes things just work, other times they don't, and you can't predict that.

My responsibility evolved over my time at Lilly. At first I was still learning a lot about the type of research I was conducting, so I would simply be told which experiments to do, but towards the end I was making suggestions to my supervisor and designing my own experiments (and even sometimes covering other people's if they were away). I was also in charge of ordering all of my own supplies (media, compounds etc.) which could be in the hundreds of pounds! So there was a great deal of responsibility there as well.

I hope to go into post-graduate research, probably in a PhD, and so the practical lab skills and analysis techniques I learned this year are invaluable to such a role (as well as for my final year lab project). However the communication and presentation skills from meetings, as well as just a massive confidence boost from meeting so many leaders in their field, communicating with them regularly and feeling like I've contributed to science. Time-management due to commuting and timing experiments is also a useful life skill I developed at Lilly.

People were very hard-working but you felt you could take a quick break and relax with most of them, so it never felt dull or boring.

Despite a few hitches with payments and tax codes in the very first week, everything was set up marvellously. We had a few useful pre-training days, and the company were very good in helping us find accomodation.

I didn't attend any formal courses as most of the job was hands-on and on-the-job. So not a huge amount, however for my role and

They don't have an official graduate scheme, however I hope gaining a PhD will help me get back into the company in a few years, and I believe having a year's experience with them will strengthen such an application.

Yes. The majority of students (15+) live in Reading and we all lived within 20 minutes walk of each other. Reading is a university town so there was plenty of pubs, clubs, restaraunts, a huge Vue cinema and shops. London is also only 30 minutes by train so it was easy to have a day trip to the capital. There was also a pub just near the station which most of us caught to work, so it was easy to have a pint there before heading home if people just wanted to meet up but not go out.

Not too expensive seeing as it was a university town. Accommodation was similar to my university city (Leeds).

Great, as mentioned there are plenty of pubs, club, restaurants and other forms of socialising and entertainment.

Yes. There was a social club, Poker nights, 5-a-side teams etc. The social club also ran trips to places like Stratford-Upon-Avon to see plays.