Eleanor is a 4th-year chemical engineering student at Heriot-Watt. With many students struggling to find work experience this summer, Eleanor's blog shows us some of the creative ways that you can find or create opportunities and the skills she's learnt.
At the start of the summer I became aware of Heriot-Watt University’s Virtual Internship Scheme Sponsored by Santander. It allowed students to reach out to small charities and intern for them while being funded for their time by Santander. I started emailing STEM-based charities enquiring about project opportunities.
Cromar Future Group got back to me almost instantly saying that they would love to have me on board. They are a small charity run entirely by volunteers aiming to provide hands-on science for children in the rural community of Deeside. My project was to coordinate workshop sessions for their Annual Science Festival 2021, which due to the pandemic was needing to be adapted to a blended online style. I put together a detailed plan for three science workshops for different aged groups focussing on, how soap works (making soap and testing its effectiveness) and the conservation of matter. For each of these workshops, I put together individual kit boxes for the experiments, worksheets and supporting materials, and conducted health and safety risk analysis. Completing this internship has equipped me with a valuable experience that has boosted my skill set when looking for opportunities in the future.
After accepting the sponsored internship at Cromar Future Group I heard back from the WISE Campaign. I decided to volunteer as an intern at the WISE Campaign as the project I would be doing was very exciting and the charity goals are ones I absolutely believe in as a woman in STEM. My project was to collect and analyse the data from all the social media posts from the #1ofthemillion social media campaign by WISE to celebrate 1 million women working in core STEM roles in the UK. This was a really great experience as I got to read hundreds of inspirational stories from other women in STEM. Overall, I really enjoyed working with the WISE Campaign, I had regular meetings with my supervisor, Katie, as well as monthly catch-ups with the other interns, where we discussed what we had been doing and talked about our favourite cheeses!
Putting a face to the 1 million collage:
Towards the end of the summer I noticed an opportunity on UDrafter (a micro-internship platform) in the energy industry, as I had just decided to complete my degree with energy engineering, I thought this would provide valuable insight to the industry. After an initial interview describing the project with Archer Knight Holdings Limited – a market intelligence company based in Aberdeen – I heard back the next day that they would like me to complete the project! The project involved finding specific information for 500 international oil and gas fields which would be included in their market intelligence SaaS platform – Flowline. This proved a challenge at first as I didn’t really know where to start. This project really helped me develop research skills that I am putting into practice right now with university coursework. After completing this project, my supervisor, Oliver, gave me a run through of Flowline, and I was amazed at how much information could be found from across the world – there are even maps in the sea showing where vessels were in real time!
Flowline software as a service platform:
Although I was unable to gain a chemical engineering summer internship in 2020, I am so glad that I took these opportunities as they have provided me with valuable experience and many transferable skills. I would like to thank Lesly Ellis from Cromar Future Group, Katie Jackson from the WISE Campaign, and Oliver Thompson from Archer Knight for all their support during these projects.