Work Placement Diary: Charlotte Istance-Tamblin – post 1

Student experience 15th October 2019

Meet Charley, a third year student currently working at AstraZeneca for her Industrial Placement. She’s going to be letting us know how she is getting on throughout the year. Here’s her first post after few weeks on the job. 

For most students, arriving on an industrial placement is either their first job ever or their first job not counting bar work or similar. But not this student, for me this is another in a long line of jobs but with one key difference… this time it’s a job I am very proud of.

I spent years selling phones until I decided I was utterly sick of the sight of them, of weekly conference calls that were the same old nonsense and of the constant nagging of an area manager demanding to know why I hadn’t sold enough contracts that week. So, I went back to school before it was too late for me to make a significant contribution to the field of chemistry.

I chose an analytical position at AstraZeneca because it is a great area of weakness for me, I have a great love of synthetic chemistry, I enjoy studying both organic and inorganic processes but I can’t begin to tell you how much I do not want to study analytical… don’t get me wrong, I don’t find it boring or anything like that, I just can’t motivate myself in the same way I can push myself to dig into other branches of chemistry. So what better way to bring my skills up to standard than to spend a year doing analytical chemistry as a job?!

As you may or may not know AstraZeneca is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, originally formed from Astra AB, founded in Södertälje, Sweden and Zeneca, successor to ICI. We have campuses across the world with the major UK bases in Macclesfield and Cambridge all employing many thousands of people.

When you first start, as always you must survive ‘trial by PowerPoint’, ‘trial by online training modules’ and ‘trial by reading and signing’. Additionally, if you are working in Macclesfield… ‘trial by rain’!

But once you have finished that you can start to get stuck into the work itself, for me, I’ve began work on some early analysis. I’ve been given a compound which has been synthesised and a basic NMR produced, I now have to asses the purity of this compound using a standard of known purity. By dissolving both the standard and the compound together in the solvent and performing an NMR analysis, it is possible to determine the purity of the compound in question.

I realise that this is something that sounds like it was lifted from the second-year undergrad teaching lab manual, but it is so much more than that. No-one knows what the outcome of this analysis will be and more to the point I was able to go and collect the compound myself and go and get on with it and that is the best part about this job, you put on your lab coat and go and get on with it.

Within a few more weeks the training on all the systems will be completed and I’ll start to turn my attention toward my major project.

Till next time, Charley xx

AstraZenecaCharleyCharlotte IWork Placement Diary