I worked on a variety of impactful projects during my placement

One of the reasons I chose the University of Bristol’s Data Science degree was because it offered a placement year. I liked the idea of working as part of a team, being able to use what I’d learnt in my degree to help people, as well as earning a salary to put towards my studies!

 Applying for placements

The University provided a lot of support for applying for placements including practice interview sessions, CV writing workshops, and meet ups every few months. I was delighted when Roche invited me for an assessment day. It was an intense experience, involving multiple interviews, tests, and a team-based exercise, although everyone I met was really kind and put me at ease. It gave me such a good idea of what it would be like to work there, that when they offered me a placement as an Analytical Data Scientist I accepted straight away!

 Joining Roche

I joined Roche’s statistical programming team, which is part of their larger data science team. I spent 3 days a week in the office, and the other 2 days working from home. It was a really interesting time to join the team as they were switching programming language from SAS to R – which I had fortunately used during my degree.

Impactful projects

I had the opportunity to contribute to several projects, including working with clinical trial data related to Alzheimer’s, where I was the only placement student on the team. I also developed a patient-level dashboard on gastrointestinal monitoring, using R Shiny, to help visualise and better understand potential causes of patients’ adverse events. Roche now use this as an internal tool.

 Transferable skills

During the year, I achieved far more than I could have imagined. As well as opportunities to present my work to a different audiences and give demos, I learnt how to develop code within a team using GitLab, and produce datasets to an industry-standard level. It also gave me a whole different perspective when I returned to my fourth year. I found it very motivating to have seen first-hand how statistics is applied in industry.

 Advice to students considering a placement

Just do it! I am incredibly grateful to everyone at Roche who supported me during my placement, who I learnt so much from. I enjoyed working on a variety of interesting challenges, meeting lots of new people, and getting paid while doing it! I now know for certain that I want to work with data, and I’m currently exploring what roles are out there.

 Value to Roche

"Placements bring immense value to Roche, with students onboarding to our teams with genuine enthusiasm, a fresh and innovative mindset, and a strong familiarity with emerging tools like AI. They also provide a talent pipeline, with many ex-students (myself included), returning to Roche after their placements to continue their career. During his year with us, Amari was instrumental in producing key deliverables for our studies, including upskilling in the latest internal and external tools to do this, thereby directly helping to advance our drug pipelines for the benefit of patients around the world." Miles Almond, Senior Data Scientist, Roche.

 

Interview written up by Dr Joanna Jordan https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannafjordan/