Industrial Placement Student Review

I enjoyed my internship far more than I could have ever hoped for. Its definitely one of the best decisions I've made to do it.

I had a great supervisor during my internship with whom I had a good relationship with, my team was also very friendly and approachable. The only negative comment I would give is that outside of your team other employees are harder to form relationships with.

My support from my supervisor was above and beyond, could not have hoped for better!

This really varied throughout the year - some weeks it would feel like you had enough but then others you struggled to find things to do and keep yourself busy with.

I was given a good amount for my level and experience, the ability to run my own experiments with any help and guidance I needed. I was also placed on some really cool interesting projects - although I know other students who only did their one project for the year.

I have learnt 10 x more in the past year than the rest of my degree. I've also found there is a lot of support if you want to learn a new skill not part of your project work.

Open plan office which I think has pros and cons - one being sitting apart from team which was sometimes difficult if you had questions. Also could be very noisy! Lunch times were great though and very social. Meetings were well organised and to the point, as a student luckily you don't have to attend too many. Labs were quite small though.

Overall all really well! However I do know some students who didn't get their work/projects going till a few months in because of organisation issues. 7 because the third party employer we were employed through were terrible at communicating everything (holiday, payroll, etc)! I personally think AZ should find another recruitment company.

Hard to put a number on but I'm guessing it was a lot with everything I was exposed to.

I think this really depends on what you want to do, realistically if you want to stay in R and D you need to go on to do your PhD and post docs. However there are other areas of the business you can go into with grad schemes available to help with this career progression.

Yes, at first I would say it was a bit awkward just like the start of uni, but AstraZeneca employ LOADs of research and development placement students each year. So there are loads of people to make friends with. I guess it depends if you like a good social scene... there's definitely no pressure to interact and go to everything but equally if you love to socialise it became easier as we all were around each other more. For example we started by all eating lunch together every day and then after a month we all started going to the pub after work every Friday, then we organised our own socials/parties. I also climbed every week and went to the pub with full time AZ colleagues so you can socialise outside of the student group. There is a football and netball team too.

Cambridge is just a really expensive place to live (only slightly less than London)- but it didn't stop us going out and enjoying the city! Just don't expect to save much.

Cambridge actually had loads going on - if pubs and shows are your thing then 10. However as a club and electronic music lover I can't say you'll find much here. Although occasionally the uni puts on some good DJs and London is only 45 mins away by train! Whilst it has rinsed my bank account I have had some great weekends exploring the capital.

AZinspire are a group for the students and they frequently put on out of work activities such as ice skating, punting, climbing etc..