Early Experiences of Science

Over the summer, Emma Terama and I had the pleasure of hosting A-level students through the Nuffield Research Placements Platform at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. The Platform provides students with hands on experience of a professional research environment, and is focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects. Jasmin and Sharif spent five weeks at UCL ISR.

We were keen for the students to experience different phases of the research process, from data collection and analysis, to writing up of the research results. To facilitate this, they worked on several projects currently being conducted at UCL ISR, including analysing household survey data for the MECON project and demographic projections for IMPRESSIONS. Jasmin and Sharif were enthusiastic, motivated and engaged, and their work has already contributed greatly to our projects. We hope that the experience was as rewarding for Jasmin and Sharif as it was for us!

Their thoughts on the work experience were just as positive and, in their own words:

“Spending my summer at the UCL Institute of Sustainable Resources has been beyond amazing. There’s not one word that can describe how beneficial this placement has been. I’ve gained many skills, from being more analytical to enhancing my creative thinking… My perspective on research has hugely changed as well, considering how uninteresting I thought it used to be when actually it is anything but that. Research isn’t only about the study of a topic but it’s investigating it too and being able to do the “detective” work was the fun part about it. The prime achievement throughout my summer at UCL is definitely all the positive feedback I have gotten out of all the work I have produced and having the opportunity to be part of something bigger was a privilege.” Jasmin

“In the summer of June 2015, I had the pleasure of working with Dr Julia Tomei and Dr Emma Terama. I was introduced to a few statistical packages as a result such as SPSS and the R programming language, and for this I am massively grateful since this is a skill set that is certainly very useful. I am already using SPSS to aid my university application process by comparing stats from different universities and league tables… Overall, I have had a wonderful and worthwhile experience at UCL and can’t think of a more valuable way to have spent my summer.” Sharif

We would like to encourage staff to grab these opportunities for engaging with students as early as possible. It was a good reminder to us as supervisors that although one experience won’t necessarily change the course of someone’s (academic) future, the positive effect that a genuine, early exposure may have, is beyond doubt.

We wish Jasmin and Sharif all the best in their future careers!