Name of Student: Matthew Turk
Degree Subject: BSC Biological Sciences
Job Title: Research Assistant
Company Name: University of Exeter
Type of Internship: Access to Internships (A2I)
- What were your key duties and responsibilities during your internship?
My key duties and responsibilities were to support research in the laboratory by assisting with the setting up and monitoring of scientific experiments and assays, keeping accurate records of experiments and data, and preparing stocks of culture media, buffers, and reagents.
- What outputs and outcomes did you deliver for your employer?
I performed transformations of plasmids, restriction digests, ligations, polymerase chain reactions, culturing experiments, inoculations, survival assays, preparation of sequence reactions, and cDNA synthesis. These experiments helped support the research being carried out in the research group.
- What was your biggest achievement on your internship?
I managed to successfully transform a difficult cut vector into E. Coli. This has been confirmed by sequencing and these E. Coli strains will now be used by the research group for their experiments.
4. Skills Learnt
- Time and workload management
- Strategic planning
- Teamwork and collaboration
- Problem solving
- Communication
5. Attributes Developed
- Confidence
- Initiative
- Perseverance
- Motivation
- Personal Awareness
6. Your message to other students considering a similar job role, organisation or sector?
“It was an incredible opportunity! I had an amazing time and was able to do things that I never would have been able to do as part of my degree course. My supervisor and the whole research group were really supportive and keen for me to get the most out of my internship that I could.”