“Doing work experience with ARC West is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made”

Jihaan is a member of our Young People’s Advisory Group (YPAG) who joined us for a week in July for a work experience placement. This is the first work placement we’ve had, but we hope to offer more to our YPAG members in the future – unfortunately we can’t offer them to other young people at present. To find out more about YPAG, contact Lucy Condon.

Deciding to work with the Applied Research Collaboration West (ARC West) for my work experience has probably been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Not only was it fun but it definitely outshone all the stuff everyone else I know was doing. Because while everyone else was doing one particular part of a job for their work experience and nothing else, with my work experience I got to see various different types of research, like qualitative research and quantitative research, biomedical research and health economics.

On the first day, we talked to Hazel from the Bristol Biomedical Research Centre and she told me about her job and what she does, which was really interesting but also an awful lot for a Monday morning. Later on in the afternoon, me and Lucy we went to the University and explored parts of the campus, which was really nice because I had originally thought the university was just one really big building not a bunch of small ones. To finish off, we talked to Andy who gave me a sort of seminar type thing which gave me tips on how I can make my research better.

On Tuesday, we went to the Bristol Clinical Research Facility and Margie gave us a tour and taught us so many cool things about the types of research that go on there, who does that research and how they do it. After that she even measured my height (turns out I’m 5’8 or 173cm). When we got back we met with Zoe from the ARC comms team, who was SO nice and taught me a lot about what it’s like to do work in comms. After that I talked to Lucy and Eva about the plans for the YPAG meeting I helped co-facilitate.

On Wednesday, we talked to Carlos from the health economics team who showed me some really interesting projects that he’d worked on and the told me how he’d gotten into health economics. It was all super interesting and kinda has me thinking about going into health economics as a career because it seemed to involve loads of maths, which I love.

On Thursday, we started a lot later and we met with Lauren and Joni from the applied data science team and they told me all these cool things about how it is to work with quantitive data. This was really nice as most of the other researchers were qualitative researchers and I was dying to talk about something maths related. After that we talked to Mari who told all about this cool project she was working on called the Health Research Ambassadors programme, which was super interesting to listen to, especially because my favourite teacher from primary was part of it.

On Friday, we started with talking to Sharea from evidence, and it was really cool because she was really friendly and gave me lots of ideas for my mock research project and all her projects that she talked about seemed really fascinating. She ALSO convinced me to go visit Finland by making it seem super lovely. After that I presented my mock project and it was just so amazing that I got funding!!

But overall it was really fun, and I would much rather go back and do it all over instead of going back to school in September.