Welcome to part two of how to secure a placement!
In this post, I will be sharing everything I did to during
Year 1 and the summer to prepare for applying for placements in September of
Year 2.
1) Building up your exp!
To make a fab CV, you're going to
share all your relevant experiences on it. Year 1 (and even taking on a new role in
Year 2) is the perfect time to do this. There are sooo many ways to gain
experience and I'll just list a few now:
volunteering, summer internships,
online courses/work exp, part-time jobs, joining a uni society committee,
degree group projects, building hobbies, shadowing, degree related skills, etc
All these are great to talk about in a CV.
If you're aiming for an R&D
placement, try to get some extra lab exp if possible. You could ask a lecturer
to volunteer in their lab (helps if you're enthusiastic about the module!), do
some shadowing or see if there any summer opportunities during summer of Year
1.
NB the only company I know that doesn't require a CV/cover letter is Pfizer. They have form to fill out instead.
2) What type of placement do you want to do?
Decide what type of placement you
want to do and tailor your CV based on this. For Biosciences, placements can be
an R&D role or office based. R&D CVs should highlight technical lab
skills and projects you worked on, whereas office based roles should highlight
more on communication and teams project but still science related. All
experiences listed on the CV should somehow be related to the type of positions
you are applying for (whether that be through acquired hard skills or soft
skills).
3) Creating a CV:
CVs can be between 1-2 pages long
depending on how much experience you have. Ideally for a Bioscience placement,
it should be two pages. You'll soon find that you're trying to condense your
experiences into two pages, because you have a lot to talk about. Modules &
grades, personal exp, uni projects, uni skills (lab, R, Excel), ect all go on
the CV! I'll link the template I used for my R&D CV below.
4) Creating a LinkedIn
For Biosciences, you're required
to make a LinkedIn in Year 2. However, lots of job application have a link to
include your LinkedIn and it looks very professional if you create one and add
it. You could even make 1-2 posts about Year 1 reflections, uni group projects,
personal work experience to spice it up. Many lecturers are also happy to
connect to you on LinkedIn, too!
5) Make a list of all your relevant experience to-date
Not essential, but handy. You're
likely to have many experiences to talk about, and only the most important go
on the CV. It'd be good to have a paper/ word doc with all your relevant
experiences on it, so if needed you can quickly recall and use it for your
interviews. For example, if during an interview they ask "tell me about a
time you worked as team", you can describe a uni group project you worked
on, even if that wasn't included on the CV. It's also good to have list so it
makes building your LinkedIn a little bit easier when the time comes.
6) What companies would you like to work for?
It's good to have a general gist
of what are the well known companies in your field and what they work on. For
Biomedical Sciences this includes AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer, J&J, Reckitt,
Eli Lily, Fortrea, etc. The Bioscience Placements Team has a webpage where you
can access a bank of job applications will come for your year, but you can also
look at previous year's job postings to see the timeline of when different
companies post their jobs. I'll link it here. (If it doesn't work, it's because
you need to be logged into your UoS account to access it).
Placement Opportunities Website
7) Decide on your credit split for Year 2
Have a lot to share on this one!
For Year 2, I wanted to take 70 credits in Semester 1 and 50 credits in
Semester 2. Why? Because when spring rolls around, I wanted to be able to relax
and spend more time outside (probably not the best reason, I'll be honest). I
will say, applying for placements and taking 70 credits was tough, but
thankfully I came into Year 2 with a whole lot of energy. If I were to do it
again, I would take a 60-60 credit split, or even 70 credits in the
summer.
If you feel that you might be
overwhelmed with studying + applying for placements in Semester 1, I know a few
people who took a language for 10 credits, and that eased the academic burden a
little bit.
8) Get the green light for your CV
Once you're CV has been created,
it's a good idea to get it checked by the Uni Placement team, in case they spot
anything that could be improved. You can also show your family members your CV
to get their opinion. Even AI could provide feedback with a prompt such as
"Can you critique if this CV is good for office based science roles, and
provide feedback of what can be improved?".
9) Creating a cover letter
Coverletterssssss. Okay, okay.
For pretty much any job, they'll require a CV plusss 1 A4 cover letter. When I
first started applying, I aimed to type every cover letter by hand. No, no, no,
no, no no. Don't do this. Each cover letter takes approx around 6 hrs to write
( that's if you're quick with it) and you'll soon find it's not feasible to do
for every application you send out.
What I recommend doing is
creating only one cover letter you typed out yourself. It shouldn't be a
repetition of your CV (another mistake I initially made). It should showcase
why you want to work for this company specifically, why the job role appeals to
you, how your experiences make you a strong candidate for the role (take a look
at the job description), the company values and how it ties into your own
values. You are essentially writing a love letter to this company.
After creating this initial cover
letter from scratch, here's what I did: copy and pasted the job description
into ChatGPT and asked them to "adapt this cover letter based on the job
description". I upload my cover letter as a file and it does a pretty good
job at adapting it! Of course, you have to go in and make changes but it lays a
really solid foundation. You can even add your CV and ask it to pick out
relevant bits from there related to the job description, so it has more to work
with. I recommend removing any dashes that ChatGPT produces in the cover
letter, as it's a key AI signature.
And that's pretty much it for placement preparation! Hope
you found it helpful, and if you have any questions, feel free to drop a
comment.
Best wishes,
Sarah
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