Showcasing industrial placements
We welcomed representatives of small, innovative scientific companies to our Burlington House home, to celebrate the accomplishments of the industrial placement scheme and learn about the benefits to the companies and the students involved.
Since 2014, the Royal Society of Chemistry has provided over £1.5 million pounds of funding for placing undergraduate students in SMEs. The scheme involved 54 chemistry SMEs, 84 students from 25 universities across the UK. Our news and media manager, Edwin Silvester, spoke to Royal Society of Chemistry colleagues, placement students and employers to find out what the scheme has achieved over the past four years.
We really believe in providing students with chances of experiencing industry and also helping SMEs to get someone who is at graduate or undergraduate level. We know that companies that employ graduates grow faster than those who don’t. This scheme is a win-win – companies get new talent, fresh ideas and additional resource. For the students it is about gaining understanding of industry, sharpening their soft skills and learning about the commercial environment – ultimately going back to university or future employment better prepared
Developing knowledge and transferable skills
That view is supported by Callum Armstrong, from Bath University, who is coming towards the end of a placement with Crystec, a crystal and particle engineering company in Bradford.
He explains: "I’m into my last month – it’s been really good and I’ve really enjoyed it – I’ve learnt a lot. It’s good to learn about analytical techniques and things like that when you’re actually at university but being able to use them and use the bits of equipment and work with the rest of the team to actually interpret all of that data is really useful. It’s been really good to develop my knowledge in that way – actually get proper knowledge of what it would be like in industry.
"I think a lot of other skills you develop aren’t necessarily scientific. Days like today when you’re travelling and things like going through interview processes – I think a lot of transferable skills come from placements, so I think it’s been really useful to have experienced that."
If at first you don't succeed...
Thusha Thurairatnam, who is on placement with Surrey Nanosystems, explains the different challenge presented by being in a professional organisation’s laboratory, where experiments aren’t designed for students with a known successful outcome.
"When you do lab work at university everything tends to work the first time you try it, so it’s given me a better insight into the fact that not everything’s going to work first time. It’s about how to work around that and find different methods, do different experiments in parallel to get to the solution, so it’s given me a more practical approach of the experiments that we do, whereas in [university] labs it just works the first time round, so that was very different for me.
"Scale-wise as well, in [university] labs it is very small scale production, whereas when you’re working in a placement it’s much larger scale, so it gave me a better picture of chemistry in a real application, so that’s really good.
"I was mainly allocated to one project – I started off thinking one thing but, as you do experiments and get different results, it goes down a different path. It was mainly one aim, so I’ve been working on that for the whole year. With the [university] course, even though we have different organic and inorganic labs, because the experiments are given to us and, as I’ve only completed the second year of the course, I’ve never done a project where you just focus on one thing, so this gave me more understanding and depth into one particular area."
A two-way street
Surrey Nanosystems' chief technical officer, Ben Jensen, sees the opportunity of working with placement students like Thusha as a benefit to everyone involved. He explains: "They get to work in areas that they couldn’t possibly experience and on technologies they haven’t come across in university, and for us, we get people who don’t have a set, preconceived notion of what can’t be done.
"Very often we get people – and we tend to take a lot of graduates anyway – we get people who don’t have a closed mindset on 'no, this can’t be done, that can’t be done'. They tend to explore until they really have tried everything possible.
"That’s brought us a lot of success and I think, from the placement point of view, they get to work on really interesting technologies and they’re not given simple projects – they’re given things that a PhD would struggle with. I think having that kind of pressure and support within the organisation allows them to learn at a much faster rate than if it’s an easy, simple project that doesn’t stretch their creative thought process.
"As I said, it’s a two-way street – I think they get a lot of benefit from it but we get a lot of benefit because we get a lot of creative thinking that perhaps we wouldn’t get from people who are more entrenched in that line of work."
Building a support network
Emily Meekel has been at Midatech Pharma, near Oxford, on a year-long placement. She echoes Thusha’s point on students using their own initiative, saying: "You have a lot more responsibility and freedom to create your own experiments, instead of following instructions, already knowing the outcome you should get. Now, you don’t know what you’re going to get and, when it goes wrong, you have to think ‘what’s happening?’ or ‘why am I seeing this?’, so it’s a lot more challenging – which is good.
"Where I work, I have a supervisor but there’s also a group of scientists and we’re all very tightly knit, with some people more specialised in a certain analytical instrument or a type of organic synthesis. At the start, when I had a problem I would always reach out to my supervisor. If he said ‘I don’t know, you could try talking to this person’, so as you go on, you find out who to ask and they give you advice. You learn that they don’t always have the answer, that they give you their opinion so you have to figure it out yourself. There’s a lot of useful feedback you can get and opinions from other scientists.
"It is a big change – I remember the first week and it was daunting, because the company I work at specialise in gold nanoparticles, which was something I’d never been acquainted with before. You meet all these people and become familiar with them but, as time goes on and because they’re all so lovely, you get used to reaching out to them and also being more confident in presenting what you’ve done and even if it’s gone wrong.
"You know all scientists make mistakes and all of them experience that, so as time goes on you get more confident that you get that vision of how it looks and that not everything is perfect. We have meetings every week and everyone shares their problems, so other scientists say ‘it could be this or have you thought about that?’."
Delving deeper and scaling up
Suraj Singh has been on placement at Scotmas, in Kelso in the Scottish Borders, working on a number of strands – from producing highly pure chlorine dioxide concentrate samples to treat water systems for hospitals and farms, to embarking on chemistry that’s completely new to the company.
"We are seeing the side of practical uses of chemistry”, he says. "It’s also delving deeper into other branches of relevant chemistry to the organisation, so it’s not only looking at a defined curriculum that the university want you to look at. It’s looking at an aspect of science and saying ‘do I need to go deeper into this to understand more of how we can use it – is there any point of looking further?’.
"I definitely enjoy the practical side of being involved in a bigger system rather than just looking at chemicals and synthesising small quantities of products. We’ve also been involved in testing an entire, commercially viable plant, so it scales up what we know about chemistry and how to deal with higher concentrations and larger volumes."
Keen to do more research
Emily Meekel says employers should consider giving a placement to students. She says: "I think it can be quite refreshing, having a new face and having to teach them. They can bring in new ideas and new knowledge – I feel like with all my colleagues, I’m treated like I’m at the same level. Obviously they do know more but as they’re so specialised on one thing and students’ knowledge is still very broad, at some points they ask how something works and I’m able to say ‘well I actually had a university course about that last year’.
"I’m more confident in my work and results, and also more keen to do research. Before it was essentially always know what you’re going to do and it’s following a recipe but now if you get the opportunity to do something in research, it’s much more exciting.
“I’m definitely more motivated as well. I would like to do a PhD, also because all my colleagues have done PhDs themselves and they do recommend that if you really enjoy chemistry and would like to pursue a career in chemistry, it would be a good call to do a PhD.
"That was one of the big questions I wanted to answer for myself in this year – do I want to do a PhD or do I want to go straight into industry or even do something completely different?"
Great opportunities for growing companies
Patrice Ribiere is a student supervisor at Thomas Swan & Co, in Consett in County Durham. He says: "For us it was an opportunity to go into a project which wasn’t perhaps the most urgent but an important one with a fair amount of challenge. Without this scheme, frankly we wouldn’t have been able to do so. Luke, our industrial student has had one year to clear the path for us and has done good work for us, so we are going to carry on ourselves from his work.
"Otherwise from a research point of view, we would have a more urgent project, not necessarily on this front, so it was a good opportunity for us to open up to a different project, get someone who is coming straight from the university, with fresh knowledge and a different point of view.
"You’ve got the industrial mindset, so sometimes it’s good to have a different pair of eyes on a project. I find it also quite refreshing to see someone coming up and developing into a role and getting more assurance and being able to be more proactive, and giving more suggestions on it, so again for us it was a good opportunity.
"I am very lucky because I’ve got a good team and I must confess I delegated a lot of day-to-day management to Jack Ellison, one of my colleagues, and for him it was a really good opportunity to manage Luke more closely and gain different skills, in terms of leadership and people management, so that was very useful."
Are you thinking of doing an industrial placement?
A number of our placement students this year took time to give some practical advice for those planning on following in their footsteps:
Suraj Singh
Jump straight into the placement. From what I’ve seen it’s definitely been worthwhile going into a placement. In terms of getting the most out of a placement – it’s really what you make it. If you’re able to communicate and network around an SME and see how you can influence different people’s projects – there’s usually many projects go on through an SME, they’re not looking to develop one aspect, they’re looking to develop in many different fields. So you can gain a wide amount of knowledge, a wide understanding of different fields, which can show you what you want to further study.
What I’ve seen is that an SME will actually show you what you’ve achieved, whereas I don’t think I’d be able to see the final product at a larger company, so it wouldn’t be as satisfying to know that you’ve actually made a difference in the company. Since I’m part of 40-50 people, I can physically see this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ve developed in the company – and this is my output.
Callum Armstrong
Try to do everything that you can. Any extra training that they’ve got going – go for that and really get the most out of it because you’re only there for a year.
Use the bits of equipment and ask questions, look up in the literature about the various things that you’re doing – that will really help you.
I’d definitely recommend it!
Thusha Thurairatnam
I think at the start of it, it’s good to spend time to understand what the company actually does. When I went in, it was such a new area for me – I’ve never worked with carbon nanotubes so it’s good to get the fundamental knowledge before you start any experiment.
As soon as you go in, you’re probably the most keen to just go and do it, but it’s better to spend that time to understand it and start your experiments from that – you’ll have a better pattern to it and more understanding of what happens.
