A year in reflection : Industrial Placement students share their experiences

As a Deuteration Chemist, Mike is developing methods for the synthesis of deuterated compounds that are used in experiments at ISIS. These contain deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. His main project was focused on making fully deuterated 1,2-dimethoxyethane (DME), with a few side projects involving the synthesis of other materials and the recycling of D2O.

The biggest challenge was probably the sheer amount I needed to learn at the start. There was a wide range of things that I didn’t know much about, especially starting in a new lab, but thankfully, the team were incredibly helpful (and patient). My first few days involved researching, and with the team helping me out and showing me around, I figured things out fairly quickly.

Rohini works with the ISIS Communications team, where she helps share the variety of scientific research taking place at ISIS. Her role involves writing science highlights and staff case studies, creating graphics and content for social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, producing monthly internal newsletters, and managing e-publications.

One of the biggest challenges was starting a science communication role as a International Business Management student. At first, I was nervous because I didn’t have a science background, but over time I realised that I was able to learn quickly and adapt. This experience helped me step outside my comfort zone and made me much more confident in my abilities.

Sujaya contributes to the development, maintenance, and improvement of SasView, an open-source application for the analysis of small-angle scattering data. His role involves balancing new feature development with maintaining the software, ensuring that SasView remains robust, user-friendly, and sustainable. He works within an international team of developers, researchers and users, contributing to collaborative discussions and aligning development work with user needs and scientific priorities.

When I was given my first bug to squash, I felt completely lost in the tens of thousands of lines of code. After an afternoon of stumbling around, I managed to find the one mischievous line and patch it. It took me months to get comfortable with the codebase. I eventually learned and accepted that it was not possible to grasp the entire software, and every day working on it would be a new learning experience.

Isha has been working in the ISIS Biolabs, with her role involving the deuteration of biomolecules, specifically proteins, using neutron scattering to obtain information. She has also spent a large chunk of her placement culturing bacteria to get it to express a specific protein.

I wouldn’t say there was a single big one, more that I have faced many little challenges. For me specifically it would be, for example, why is my bacteria not growing? Why is it not making the protein I wanted? What can I do to push this a bit further or to increase the yield? I faced many little challenges where it was like, this is not working and I don’t know why. I overcame these by looking back into the research, discussing it with my manager and kind of just learning more information around the specific problem I was trying to solve to try.