On Monday 24th March, we welcomed Amber Leighton, a Year 12 student at Didcot Girls’ School for her Work Experience week at Neuro-Bio.
The aim of their Work Experience week is to:
🔸 Develop pupil employability and leadership skills
🔸 Create enthusiasm for work and specific careers
🔸 Develop relationships between our school, employers, and pupils
Amber worked alongside and was supervised by one of our current interns Georgina Bonny. Georgina stated it was an absolute delight to supervise Amber, emphasizing on her enthusiasm and willingness to learn.
Amber has left us a lovely farewell message and note about her experience with us:
“My work experience week at Neuro-Bio was such an interesting opportunity where I learnt so much. Everyone was so welcoming and open to any questions I had. I was able to shadow Georgie, a junior scientist for the entire week where I observed and assisted in her Western Blot and Calcium Flux Assay. She taught me in depth about each step of the assays and answered the many questions I had as I was completely new to not only the experiments but also the lab environment. Because the lab environment was so unfamiliar to me, the first day included me learning how to use a pipette which allowed me to become more comfortable with the equipment used in the lab on a day-to-day basis. I also observed many other experiments I had never heard of; cell splitting, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), cell viability assay and protein extraction. My favourite part of my experience was my very own Pierce Assay I was able to conduct under the supervision of Georgie. This was especially exciting as it gave me experience of actually doing an assay. I also analysed my data on Excel which I used to plan out a Western Blot. This gave me practice in areas that were very new to me and helped me understand the role of a research scientist. I learnt how to analyse data by identifying and eliminating outliers to visually represent the data in a bar chart. I am so grateful for this opportunity, and it has solidified my decision to become a part of the scientific research industry.”