Category: Placements

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Overview of my GSK placement year

By Lauren Wheeler, Stage 3 Biomedical Sciences

During my placement, I worked at the GSK R&D site in Stevenage as a placement student within the SPMB department (Screening, Profiling and Mechanistic Biology). SPMB works on assay development, compound profiling and mechanism of action studies.

My role involved automating a 3D hepatotoxicity assay by creating a model to validate a fully integrated platform in order to move the manual assay onto the platform, as well as running a biweekly safety screening assay.

When starting my labwork, I was supervised but I was allowed to complete the work myself which I found very beneficial as it allowed me to make mistakes which I could learn from. I found myself able to start completing my own experiments independently a lot faster than I expected to. Everyone in the lab was also very helpful and was always willing to help or answer any questions when I got stuck.

During my time at GSK, I also got to take part in many other activities alongside my project work which allowed me to gain and improve skills, to network and improve relationships with other IPs (industrial placement students) as well as other GSK employees.

Myself and some other committee members at the International Women’s Day selfie corner – names of people from left to right: Francesca Dale, Lauren Wheeler, Lydia Haines, Neve Richardson

I became a committee member of both the Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) and the Stevenage hub committee. With both, I worked with other IPs and members of the committee to organise events such as International Women’s Day and the employee appreciation cookie post.

I was head of logistics for International Women’s Day in which I held key responsibilities in organising attendance numbers, booking catering, setting up market stalls with other employee resource groups at GSK and setting up of the lecture theatre for the event. The event included 2 talks and a panel which were all very insightful and turned out to be a great success with many attendees. I was also rewarded a recognition award (R&R) for my contribution.

I also worked with another IP to organise the employee appreciation cookie post in which GSK employees could donate £2 to save the children which would allow them to send a cookie along with a message to another GSK employee. These were delivered by hand by us, so it was really nice to see how happy and thankful people were when receiving a cookie.

Basket of cookies labelled for each person ready to be delivered

I took part in the Tough Mudder challenge in May 2023 with around 30 other GSK employees in which we raised £350 each and completed a 15km run with 30 obstacles. This was a difficult challenge however we stuck together as a team throughout the course, and it felt like a big achievement once we completed it.

Myself and other GSK employees after finishing the Tough Mudder – names of people from left to right: Ross Biddulph, Samuel Pearson, Jake Brett, Lydia Haines, Lauren Wheeler, Francesca Dale, Neve Richardson, Rebecca Glenny

I was also a part of a netball team at GSK where we trained once a week on a Wednesday, it was a mixed team with members from across the GSK Stevenage site. We took part in a match against the Ware site, which we won as well as a charity tournament, all of which were great experiences to take part in.

During this year, I have also had the chance to take part in IP collaboration events. I attended an IP organised presentation session every 2 weeks in which IPs across different departments presented about their projects as well as discussing any issues they had been having. This was a good opportunity to network and learn more about other departments work.

Myself and some other IPs attending an IP collaboration presentation session – names of people from left to right: Neve Richardson, Lauren Wheeler, Francesca Dale

We also had a lab tour exchange with the Ware site in which I helped in touring the IPs around the labs I worked in as well as going to the Ware site for a tour. It was insightful to see the later stages of the drug development process.

Overall, this placement year has been an invaluable experience in which I have been able to learn and experience far more than I could have expected when I first joined. I have gained many new skills and have really increased my confidence. I’d highly recommend a placement at GSK! Check out their Early Career talent site here for more information.

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Day in the life of a Student Dietitian on Placement – Eating Disorders

Hi – it’s Georgia the Student Dietitian again! So on the last blog post I talked about what it was like to be on placement in a secure inpatient unit. I said I would also give some insight into my day in the life in an Eating Disorder unit – so here it is!

Background context – Eating Disorders is an umbrella term that can describe many different disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia and others. The patients in my care ranged from 18 to 75 years old and covered all genders. There is lots of psychology often required within Eating Disorder services, so Dietitians work alongside other healthcare staff to provide a holistic form of care to patients. For my placement I worked across inpatient units (on a ward within a hospital), community, and day service. This gave me a really good insight into all of the different areas you could work in as a Dietitian in Eating Disorders.

The different types of services: So i mentioned that there are three different types of services. I am just going to explain a tiny bit about each one so that you are aware of the difference.

Inpatient services – This is where patients are on a ward and have their own rooms. They are monitored and supported 24/7 by staff and are sometimes allowed leave off the ward. Patients on these ward often get their weight and bloods monitored more often and can be put onto a feeding tube if necessary.

Community – This is a service which manages and supports Eating Disorder Patients within the comfort of their own homes. Dietitians will often visit patients where they live and provide advice and support around meal plans and cooking facilities etc.

Day service – Day service is a service which allows patients to attend a clinic for the whole day or half the day to have their meals and be supported by cooking for themselves. So patients tend to spend the whole day at the service and they will have supervised breakfast, lunch, dinner and 3 snacks. They are also supported to cook for themselves in order to mimic what it would be like for the patients at home.

My day to day experience:

As all of the services were very different, I unfortunately do not have enough writing room to describe all of these (plus I think you would probably get bored!). Therefore, here is a day in the life of a student on an inpatient ward….

Morning: I usually arrive at the hospital at 9am to prepare for the day. The Dietitians have their own office where they can produce resources, write up notes and host team meetings with other healthcare professionals. The start of the day I would usually read about on patient backgrounds and fill in my patient notes based on what I can already access (for example recent weights and blood results). I would then find out what diet plan they are currently on and assess whether this would need changing (diet plans are often progressed step by step to gradually increase intake). After this, I would then usually see around 2 patients for lunch to discuss their progress and come up with future action plans.

Afternoon: After the patients (and staff) have their lunch, we usually continue consultations with patients throughout the afternoon. We do have to be careful to not interrupt snack times however as this is obviously a very important part of their day. Often patients are very visibly upset during consultations as the last thing they want to discuss is food, so showing lots of empathy and understanding can really go a long way during these sessions. Again, my communication skills in this sector definitely developed further as it was very different to what I had learnt at Uni! After my consultation sessions, I would then make any changes to diet plans if this was necessary that day and would add this to the patient notes. I would then head home for a good sleep as I am usually very tired by the end of the day!

As always, if anyone has any questions about what it is like to do Dietetics and what placement is like, please leave a comment! Thank you 🙂

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Day in the Life of a Student Dietitian on Placement

Hi everyone! My name is Georgia and I am a 4th year Dietetics Student. When people ask me ‘so what do you do?” I dread it, because the conversation normally goes like this: “I do Dietetics at University” “You do what now? I’ve never heard of that! Do you just tell people to not be fat?”.

So, in order to give a bit of an insight into what Dietitians do, I have decided to describe a day in the life whilst I am at placement! My placement is split into two sectors – Forensic Secure Inpatient Service and Eating Disorders. I am going to give you a bit of an overview of what it has been like in both, however I will do a separate post for my experience in Eating Disorders otherwise this could be quite a lengthy post!

Secure inpatient services

As the name suggests, Secure Inpatient Services is a hospital for people with mental health illnesses who have committed crimes. Rather than going to prison, people are admitted into a secure hospital for psychiatric treatment. You might think – “How does a Dietitian fit into a secure unit?” – I thought the same thing! The main role that I had during my time at this service was educational sessions regarding cardiovascular disease.

Unfortunately in a service such as this, many patients are on antipsychotic medicines which can often have a significant side effect of weight gain. Due to this, many of the patients within this unit had a BMI of over 45 (for reference, a healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9).

So now I have provided some context, welcome to my day in the life!

Morning: I wake up at about 7:30 to make sure that I have time to have a proper breakfast and get prepared for the day. I then drive to the hospital and often join a team ‘huddle’ in the morning. Huddles are a meeting with all the Dietetics staff (including Nutritionists and Dietetic Assistants) to discuss how we are getting on with the patients and if we have any new referrals. After this meeting, I would then go down to the ward to see a patient for an education session. To get onto the ward you have to go through an airlock system with lots of security measures in place. Once on the ward, I would normally have an educational session regarding the consequences of high saturated fat and sugar intake on our cardiovascular health. Some patients who I was giving education sessions to were in ‘seclusion’, which is a separate room from everyone else that most people are not allowed to enter. This made communication fairly difficult, but it was a great learning curve!

Afternoon: After lunch, I would usually prepare for the patients that I was seeing that afternoon. I would read through all the patient notes to gather a background on the patient and produce any resources which I may need for the sessions. Many of the patients that I was working with could not read and the only resources we had available were lengthy written resources, so I spent a lot of time producing easy read, pictorial resources for patients which seemed to go down very well. After my sessions with the patients, I would then attend a basketball session with a patient with a BMI of 54 to encourage physical exercise. This was a great session as it also allowed the staff to participate and build rapport with the patients. I really enjoyed this! Finally, I would go back to the office and write up all of my notes from the patient consultations so that other health professionals can be aware of what we have discussed.

I would then tend to go home, cook something quick because I was tired and then watch Netflix until I fell asleep!

I hope you find this useful and if you have any questions please feel free to comment. I really enjoyed this placement and would recommend it to anyone doing Dietetics as you learn communication skills that you probably wouldn’t learn anywhere else. So if you get allocated this placement welcome it with open arms! You may love it like I did.

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Placements – An overview of 3rd year Dietetics placements in the NHS.

Hi everyone! My name is Georgia and I am a third year Dietetics student currently on my B placement. I thought I would give an overview of what you can expect from your B placement on the Dietetics course – I hope you find it helpful!

How are placements allocated?

At the beginning of my third year, at around September time, we are all given forms to fill out which we can fill in our Trust preferences. So you don’t really choose your preferences based on location as you could be placed anywhere within a Trust. For example, I received my 2nd choice which was Tees, Esk and Wear Trust. I chose this trust as it is a Mental Health Trust, which was something I was super interested in! So I was excited to get started.

Where was I based?

A few months after receiving our Trust allocations, we were contacted by our placement supervisors to let us know where we would be based. I was allocated Roseberry Park in Middlesbrough (which is a forensic unit) and community eating disorders (so I was based in different areas around Teeside).

How did I feel about my allocations?

At first, when I realised that I was going to a forensic unit where people had committed crimes, I was nervous but also excited. I had no idea what a forensic Dietitian did or what the job would entail. I decided that it would probably be best for me to move to Middlesbrough so that I didn’t have to travel everyday. In hindsight I probably should have visited Middlesbrough before choosing my accommodation, however at least I can pass on this wisdom to the later years! So just to reiterate – please check out the accommodation that you are going to book in person before you book it!!

My experience in the Forensic Unit (Secure Inpatient Services)

As previously mentioned, I was so nervous to go but also so excited to see what it would be like. From the first day that I arrived, the staff were so friendly and made me feel at home within an hour. This was a really promising start and made me so relieved. I was nervous to meet the patients as I had never had any experience with people in prisons or secure units, however to my surprise everyone was so nice to me! We even had a Medieval fun day, which included games, a banquet and craft stalls. It was super fun and I would go back in a heartbeat! So the main takeaway from this experience is to never judge something before you try it – I could definitely imagine myself working in this sector in the future.

My experience in eating disorders

This was completely different to my previous placement in secure inpatient services (SIS). In SIS, the majority of the patients were overweight, some of who had BMIs over 40. Going from that to seeing patients with a BMI of 13 was a very dramatic change and took some getting used to. Again as this was predominantly community, it was very different again as I was hardly seeing the same patients twice. This made it slightly harder to build up the same kind of relationships with patients, but I think this will be the case no matter which sector you are in. All patients are different and that is all part of the learning experience! I think this is another benefit of having 2 different 6 week placements instead of one 12 week placement in one area.

What are my top tips for students starting placement?

I could go on and on about different tips I would give to students starting placement, so I will try and keep it quick. First, as previously mentioned I would definitely say don’t judge a sector before you try it. I had no idea what to expect from forensics and now I love it. Also, and I will say it again, check out the area that you are moving to before you move there! Placement can be hard so it is important to make sure you have a nice supportive environment for when you get home. Finally, make sure you get enough sleep because I won’t sugar coat it, placement is exhausting! You are constantly learning and meeting new people so making sure you prepare the best you can for the day will make all the difference.

So good luck with placements, and remember to not be so hard on yourself. The whole point of placement is to learn so don’t worry if you make mistakes. That is the reason you are there! Most importantly enjoy it and take on every opportunity you can.

If you are interested in studying Dietetics at Newcastle University make sure to check out this page: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/degrees/b401/

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Top tips for applying to placements!

By Amelia Guest, BSc Biomedical Sciences

Hi! My name is Amelia, and I am a third-year Biomedical Sciences student. I am currently on a year of placement at AstraZeneca, and I wanted to share some top tips for anyone who is applying for their placement year!

LinkedIn for networking

LinkedIn is a great tool to use for networking. This platform allows you to contact current placement students and ask for their experience and assistance, as well as connecting with potential placement providers! In fact, I got my first interview through LinkedIn.

Prioritise

Put all of your focus on a few providers which you are really interested in – it will be more beneficial than applying to loads of providers halfheartedly. When interviews start, they take a lot of time so if you are not too interested in a certain provider it will probably be best to utilise this time elsewhere.

Gather information

Make sure you research the website or social media platforms of the placement provider so you can be really specific in your application and interview. It may even be worth using LinkedIn to contact someone internal to get some extra information! During the interviews they often ask about company values, so it will really help your case if you can discuss these.

Rejections

It is easier said than done, but try not to let rejections put you down! Each interview is a learning curve and you can learn new things that you can do better next time. The more people you talk with and interview with – the more networking! All of the students that I am currently working with at AstraZeneca received rejections from other companies, so it just goes to show that perseverance can go a long way!

Careers Service

Use the Careers Service to help with your application – the Careers Service are there to help you with CV advice and practice interviews, so utilise them! It may be the difference between getting your dream job or not.

Good luck! Try your best and have a great placement year.

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FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies: Advancing Tomorrow’s Medicines

By Declan Wales

FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies (FDB for short) is a global contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) in the biopharmaceutical industry providing process development and manufacturing of biologics, cell and gene therapies and viral vaccines. This basically means that FDB are able to manufacture a broad range of therapeutic proteins for customers using mammalian, bacterial, viral and insect expression systems and can develop these expression systems to suit the needs of these target compounds.

I spent my placement year within the Process Development (PD) division, specifically the Mammalian Cell Culture (MCC) PD department.  One of the tasks in my department was to carry out optimized fed-batch processes using bioreactors to grow cell lines, the cells then produce the target therapeutic protein which can then be purified and analysed by other departments within PD for customers.  

FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies Billingham Site: Art used from FDB Marketing

Why did I want to do a placement?

When starting my degree I hadn’t thought about the possibility of doing a placement year. Then COVID hit and my degree was heavily impacted which meant I missed out on a lot of lab sessions and became disappointed with the lack of hands-on experience I was getting. I read the BNS placement blogs and was really impressed with what other students had got up to in previous years and how they were able to get some industry experience before graduating so I applied for three placements that appealed to me and managed to secure the second one which was FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies! 

A Day in the life

I’ve found every day to be different so there wasn’t much of a typical day.  However, we had a team meeting daily to discuss everyone’s tasks for the day which gave me the opportunity to offer my help and get involved in work.

  • A typical bioreactor used at FDB: Art used from FDB marketing
  • Sampling an XDR10 Bioreactor for daily analysis

If there was a bioreactor process ongoing, then my days would be much more regimented. The morning would begin with sampling several bioreactors growing Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells and measuring the metabolites, gases, osmolality and cell counts using high-tech analytical equipment. Sampling shows us how the culture is doing and if we need to alter any of the parameters to improve the process, any abnormal data would indicate possible contaminations which are serious during customer projects. These bioreactors would need feeding later in the day with supplements such as feeds, glutamine and glucose to maintain the cultures and ensure the best product titres.

Adapting to a new routine

I thought I would be able to adapt quickly to working on placement, but it was harder than I anticipated. The 9 to 5 is a big change when you are used to the flexible timetable of university and it can be hard to stay engaged at work if you are tired so making sure you get enough sleep is important. However, one huge benefit was that my weekends were totally free and I could do whatever I liked free of Uni work. I had a lot of training to ensure I was confident and competent in carrying out my tasks which can take some time to get used to and can be a lot of information to take in but it meant that I was comfortable undertaking tasks independently.   

It’s not all lab work!

I found time outside of the lab to be just as fulfilling as time in the lab. I had not really thought before about the business side of science but it was interesting to see the relationships between employees and customers when I attended meetings for certain projects and how being able to present information and communicate effectively and professionally with customers is just as essential in an industry role as is being skilled in the lab.  

One of my last days on site.

I got to take on responsibilities outside of the lab that were essential to the running of my department, the biggest helping to implement a new electronic laboratory notebook system in which I inputted equipment as well as essential reagents used for media and feed preparations. I also got to train my colleagues how to use this system and software for their feed preps as I was the one of the first to use it. This allowed me to develop important skills outside of the lab which I can now demonstrate to future employers.  

Would I recommend a placement?

Yes, I would absolutely recommend a placement for a lot of reasons, some of the main ones being:

  • You get more lab experience if you’re on a lab-based placement 
  • You gain a lot of new skills you can demonstrate in the future and develop ones you already have 
  • You can earn a good wage 
  • You get to experience the science industry and see if it’s for you 
  • Make friends/network with people in the industry find out what they did and if they enjoy what they do 
  • In some cases, if you impress the company they will offer you a job if you come back after you have graduated
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My IDS Adventure!

By: Ben Gardner

What I thought of the summer placement.

My time at ImmunoDiagnosticSystems (IDS) was extremely valuable and interesting, it was great to see what we learn about at uni being used in real-life.

I learnt many skills in the lab including immunoassays, antibody purification, and accurate working. I have also developed my ability to document labwork, process data, and think critically. It was interesting to see the many different departments IDS has and how they interact. IDS is an excellent company for aspiring bio-scientists with special thanks to Michael Gardner, the rest of the Process Development department, and the Quality Control department. They all really helped me on my placement, and I had a great experience chatting with them in the labs and the office. I would highly recommend other students to take up a placement at IDS and I can guarantee they will have a wonderful time!

Continue reading “My IDS Adventure!”
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Spending my summer break in labs in Thailand

By: Cornelia V. Genika BSc Biomedical Sciences

Hi! I am Cita, from Indonesia, and a stage 2 student of Biomedical Sciences, and here I would like to share my experience joining a 10-day science training program in Thailand during the summer break!

Over the summer I joined a science training program ran by Mahidol University in Thailand. I was introduced to this program by my friend, and I decided to join it as I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to develop the lab skills that I have gained throughout the first year and gain new scientific knowledge, meet new people, and build connections, as well as improve my CV.

Continue reading “Spending my summer break in labs in Thailand”