Industrial Trainee Review

I thorough enjoyed being able to start from scratch in learning a completely different scientific field to those covered in my degree. This made my work very interesting as I was constantly learning and trying new things although some tasks did become monotonous occasionally as the experimentation required by my project was very time-consuming.

All colleagues were very polite and friendly and made me feel very welcome. the only negative comment is that as my project was largely independent of the work of the other project teams in my department I did occasionally feel a little separate from everyone else and would have appreciated the opportunity to have greater interaction with my colleagues.

My supervisors were always happy to give support and we organised regular weekly meetings in which we could discuss any problems I had encountered. I always found the discussion constructive and my supervisors were able to make helpful suggestions to aid me in my work. They also were a very useful for resource for me to bounce ideas off and I always valued their opinion.

I was busy most days and had regular weekly meetings with my supervisor to ensure that the volume of work was just about right. I prefer to busy and hence my supervisor was able to find lots of activities to fill my time at work and make my role feel very fulfilling. However, having said that my supervisor was also flexible so if I felt I was struggling she was able to help me to prioritise tasks correctly.

I was given a fairly large degree of responsibility on placement as I was given my own project and so was responsible for carrying it out and completing the project myself. My supervisors also hand a fairly hands off approach meaning I could get on with my work without feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder and made me more determined to be successful in my role.

My placement has really widened my knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry as well as providing me with many transferrable skills. Most of these new skills revolve around software packages that I had not previously been aware of such as electronic laboratory notebooks and software to control chromatographic systems. The biggest area in which my skills have developed is more of a mind set and perspective change that allows me to be more efficient in my work. What I mean by that is I have learnt several ways of improving the quality of work that I do. For example, using statistics to evaluate the most important factors effecting my reactions so that I perform the right experiment the first time round. I have also had the opportunity to attend many technical forums in which technical problems and their solutions were discussed giving me a much greater knowledge of the background to my project work.

I was allowed to attend multiple internal training sessions over the course of my placement even ones that were not necessarily required for my project and once I had completed I was allowed to work with colleagues in other teams and learn new and interesting skills for example I spent a lot of time with the Structure elucidation group and was able to improve my analytical chemistry skills as well as see them put into use in an industry setting.

I would be very interested in working for Pfizer again in the future as I had a very positive impression of all my colleagues and found my work interesting. I liked the flexibility of the organization and the ability to change roles fairly easily if you were interested.

Yes, there was a small group of placement students (about 15) and we spent lots of time together and did everything from watching films together on week nights to short city breaks on weekends, finances permitting!

The cost of living was fairly high as we lived in an expensive area of town. However, socialising was fairly cheap in that there was a very cheap and very good local cinema about 5 minutes walk from where we were living and nights out were fairly cheap in the university city about 30 minutes and a pint around £3.50 in the local pub.

The nightlife was fairly small as my placement was based at a small science park in the countryside and I was living in a small town nearby. There is night available for those who want it by travelling to the nearest city about 30 minutes away but I didn't do this very often as I have never really keen on nights out and it just seemed like too much trouble trying to organise getting back and things like that.

There was an option to work flexi-time in order to get involved activities outside work. I can only really speak of personal experience but I was able to train for a marathon with the local running club and play football once a week with colleagues from work. I am not sure of other activities available in the local area but there are definitely ways of managing your time to take part in them if you want to.