Internships

Summer work for scientists can be both interesting and rewarding. Below, some people give details of their experiences. Email addresses are included at the end of each statement, in case you want to contact the author for more information!

Philip Freeman – Mathematics

I found an 11-week placement on the Cambridge Careers website with a company based near Royston developing video camera software for mobile phones. After a phone interview, I went for a face-to-face interview in Lent term, and in the end I was offered a choice of two projects. I took a job in Multimedia, and enjoyed it so much I decided to stay for an extra two weeks. Although the hours were less flexible than similar university placements in the centre of town, the pay was generally better, so funding wasn't a problem. (paf31)

David Hodgeson – Engineering

The Engineering Dept. offers summer work placements for undergraduates (Engineering, Natsci, or Maths) coined UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme). These are 10-week research placements within the department, working under a member of staff on a project you negotiate with said member of staff. UROPs are a good taster to help you decide whether or not you want to do a PhD, and they let you develop new skills without the pressure of having to do something useful for a company. Placements and application details can be found at http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/teaching/urops/index.html - the list of available positions gets updated weekly from mid-lent-term. Funding used to be given to all UROPs by the CMI scheme, though this is being cut – I was half funded by CMI, and half through a local company. My placement was awesome; I investigated and implemented a computer vision algorithm (it was much more fun than it sounds – honest!). Day-to-day this involved working in a lab with the Info-Engineering PhD students, and having chats with my supervisor. Quick hint: If you don’t like any of the placements offered on the website, do what I did – go and ask your favourite lecturer if you can do a UROP with them, and get them to make one specially for you. (dhw33)

Huw Naylor – Natural Sciences

I did 9 weeks in the Genetics Department (right opposite Pembroke, so if you get a college room it's really convenient) doing roughly half molecular biology, half genetics, in Drosophila. The genetics involved producing a mutant library, to be screened for mutations in the viral resistance pathway, using P-element insertions; the molecular stuff was basically cloning of the virus RNA to produce a cDNA in an E. coli plasmid vector for use as a probe in Western blots and in situs of the virus. I made the application by e-mail to Michael Ashburner, the head of the lab, having found him on David Ellar's list that he hands out to 1B BMB people looking to do Biochem. We managed to get £150 a week from the Genetics Society, after I sorted it out too late to get hold of a Nuffield or Wellcome Scholarship: my advice would be to get on with it early! (hwn20)

Lowri Elis-Williams – Vetinary science

I worked in the Neuroscience department in the Vet School in the West Cambridge site. This was very cool, because it's supposedly high security which means you have a super card to get access, but the doors are always held open with chairs because it's too hot there. The lab is a very friendly place. Everyone in the lab is working on myelin development, but from very different aspects, which makes it a very interesting place to be. My (mindless, but useful) work was with a post-doc in the lab. The project was part of a larger paper he's working on. We were doing in-situ hybridisation on the rat caudal cerebellar peduncle, looking for expression of the sox genes. We got great results. (lne21)

Tim Funnell – Natural Sciences

My summer placement was with UCB-Celltech, a medium sized pharmaceuticals company based in Cambridge and Slough with a main headquarters in Belgium. The company has links with Pembroke (you’ll see them written on the Library wall!) and I wrote to their head of R&D, who is an honoury fellow. There was a round of interviews in January and they offered me a 12 week placement for the summer. Usually they take on about 2-3 summer students. I was really lucky and got to skip around departments, I spent 6 weeks with the pharmacology team, this involved lab work on animal tissues testing new compounds they had made and creating a new assay. They let me play with all of the equipment and went through basic lab techniques. I then moved to Biochemistry, where the emphasis was much more on individual cells but a similar sort of lab experience. I finished with a week in Chemistry was theoretically the most interesting but very dull in the lab. The excellent thing about my placement was that I was still based in Cambridge, lots of scientists get placements in their second summer and it was really sociable still being in Pembroke. The pay was nice as it more than covered the extortionate summer rent and took away financial worries of Michaelmas. (tmf31)