Louise Pilkington

"I am right at the start of my career so I don't know fully where my skills in the workplace will lie. I enjoy working in a team but also being responsible for individual pieces of work. The \"developer\" personality really fits me and what I do because I am working on medicines that could potentially save peoples lives and I love that focus. I am always working logically to find better ways of doing things and producing high quality work. For me \"explorer\" definitely fits as I am always interested in learning new things and talking to people about what they do. In clinical trials, this is particularly good because there are so many different people involved. "

"I’m doing my degree in Biomedical science. Currently, I am on my placement year at GSK (a pharmaceutical company) working as a clinical data manager. It is my first job in industry as I haven't finished my degree yet- I have done 2 years and go back after one year working at GSK to do my final year. In my job I am responsible for the data that comes from clinical trials. When drugs/therapies are being tested in humans, lots of information is collected about how the patient reacts and logged. The logged information is checked by people like me to make sure it makes sense (for example, asking the doctors why the person has a heart rate of 870 or why they have a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius). I also work within a bigger team who run the trial. I contribute to their meetings and get to hear about everything else going on in the trial such as recruitment, which countries are getting the drug next, when the regulators give approval to the drug. The data I look after is also what is used to decide whether the drug will be approved and goes into the articles and studies written by the scientists. Currently, I am working on 2 different potential cancer drugs that are in really early stages, so it's really exciting to be involved in potentially ground-breaking drugs.The best part is definitely working in a global team. I work regularly with people from all over the globe, meaning I get to talk to some really interesting people. I also work with a lot of different job roles. This means I've got a really good understanding of how clinical trials work and my job ideas for the future."

"I am on my placement year. This just means I took a year out of my degree to work in industry to get work experience and figure out what I want to do when I graduate. I knew I wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry working on developing new drugs but I wasn't so sure about lab work. I applied to this role because I thought it would give me a good idea of how clinical trials run and what I could do for the future. "

"I really love astronomy! I had an amazing physics teacher at school who run an after school astronomy club. I ended up getting a GCSE in astronomy when I was in year 10. Whenever it's a clear night, you'll always catch me outside somewhere looking at the stars, especially during a meteor shower. As much as I love human biology, there are other aspects of science I like to learn about too. If you want to get inspired, check out the online planetarium at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. "

"What I love about my job is that no day is the same. My job is computer based so I log on in the morning and have a look at my meetings for the day and reply to my emails. I often get emails from the person in charge of running the study, updating everyone in the study team about what's going on in the study and any updates we need to be aware of. After that, I start on my tasks for the day. This could be looking at the data that a lab has sent to us and checking everything matches up, or going to meetings with the rest of the study team to find out what activities I should be focusing on next. For this, I'm usually talking to people across multiple countries. I join calls with the different sites that are running the trials once a week to see how they are doing and help with any data issues. Other times, I will organise meetings with people from different departments to get an idea about what they do. What is great about a placement is that no one expects you to know everything so I can ask lots of questions and speak to different people to get a feel of what jobs I might be interested in later on. Also within my work, I get to organise development events for all the other students based in my office as well as get involved in the STEM ambassador programme. "

"A Level: Biology, Chemistry and History Gap year (voluntary experience abroad and working in and American summer camp) University of Birmingham: Biomedical science Bachelors degree GSK clinical data manager"