Aaron's Internship Working on Microbial Remediation of Biomass Wastewater -- The Halfway(ish) Point

2013 has landed in our laps, with all the optimism of impending cuts, austerity measures and other unfortunate circumstances. Times are harder than ever in the job market, and the most important thing that employers are looking for is experience. An internship is a decent way to fill in those blank spaces on your CV, and for those who don’t remember I’ve been doing mine in the Biological Sciences department, working on microbial remediation of the UEA biomass plant’s wastewater. I may be slightly late here (I distinctly remember promising to write in a fortnight’s time, on the 29^th of October), but here’s my halfway entry.

‘Halfway!?’ I hear you scream wildly, pieces of your favourite biscuit exploding from your outraged mouth, ‘internships are only supposed to be for 8 weeks, and yours started in the middle of October!’ I know this well, and I was supposed to finish on the 8^th of December. However, as my research project turned out to be less costly than anticipated (I realised I could perform my own analyses, rather than sending them to another lab), there were enough funds to stretch to another 4 weeks of interning, which is where I now find myself.

The six weeks of internship that followed my last entry passed much more quickly than I expected. I really got to grips with the aims of my research and what was needed to reach them, and settled in to the process of research reasonably comfortably. As with all scientific endeavours, there were plenty of false leads, technical issues and less-than-conclusive results, but in such a short time these things are to be expected, even wanted: I learnt a lot more trying to fix problems with processes and equipment than I would have if all was smooth sailing. I found my feet with the experiments I was performing, and liaising with the different stakeholders of the project made me feel that I had made a real contribution. After the 8 weeks was up, I faced a month’s break; my (Australian) supervisor was returning to her sunny climes for Christmas and the New Year, and we decided it would be better to break and reconvene in January, rather than me continuing unsupervised.

The month’s break saw the completion of many PhD applications, some real soul-searching, and an eventual decision to re-align my career aims. To cut a long story short, I changed my mind about pursuing a PhD. My skills and interests don't match up well enough with PhD research for me to really devote myself to it, and devotion and persistence are what a PhD is all about. I’ve decided that a career in science communication and policy would suit me better, so that’s now the main goal! I really think my time off was crucial, as it allowed me to really focus on what my priorities were, weigh up pros and cons, and finally make a call. My internship has also played an important part in this choice: although I’ve genuinely enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next 4 weeks, I’ve realised that other things hold more potential for me. Without the internship, I wouldn’t have had the chance to experience full-time research and probably would’ve made a different decision, committing to a path that I deep down wasn’t entirely happy with. This is an important, additional benefit of internships that are often forgotten in the new graduate’s quest for experience; experience is not just a paragraph on your résumé, it’s a chance to try a career on for size, and see if it fits.

So now I’m looking towards the next stage of the internship. I think it’ll be business as usual, more experiments and analyses. I can’t wait to be back on campus, because UEA is a great place to work. Who knows, perhaps I’ll start looking for another internship? It’s working out well so far!