Tuesday 14 August 2018

Sina Bastani - Summer STEM Work Placement - Weekly Reports


The STEM placement students are sending us weekly blogs all about their experience in the world of work! 

Work experience is great and it provides students with many benefits whilst gaining skills and helping choose the right future career path for pupils. Having work experience on a Curriculum Vitae will make a person stand out to employers as they will notice they have motivation and a real passion for work. It will also help to boost a students confidence in themselves!

See how Sina is getting on with his STEM placement!

Week One 

"I have learnt quite a lot only in the first week of my placement. We had the privilege to attend lectures given by Dr. Radu about semi-conductors, something I was entirely unfamiliar with but Radu managed to keep the lecture interesting and intriguing by involving us in his talk. He asked us to mimic the structure of semi-conductors with Play-Doh and demonstrated how its construction can be modified to maximise space. This then got followed by another brief talk from Dr. Vlad which taught us how to make a proper science paper. During the rest of the week, I familiarised myself with my subject at hand and learned valuable lessons about science research." 

Week Two 

"The second week was eye opening for me. My teammate and I got stuck on a certain aspect of our research and tried to make sense of it using our combined logic and by conversing with each other. After a few more hours of research, we completely understood the topic we used to be stuck on which was very rewarding. We also had the opportunity to visit the clean room, which is a laboratory at the University of Surrey designed to reduce contamination at maximum. The lab technician also introduced us to the most important pieces of technology and instruments in the clean room." 

Week Three 

"During the third week, our time was mostly spent experimenting. Again, we have come across a dead end when our experiment did not work properly and showed unenthusiastic results. We have tried to use our common sense and had a crack at working out the problem with the help of Dr. Vlad, but we have not come up with a significant solution. In a desperate attempt, I emailed the scientist that worked on the scientific paper we were concerned with and with much satisfaction, I received an email back from Australia by that same scientist informing us of ways to possibly improve our experiment. We have also spent time in the mechanical engineering department to test the tensile strength of our material." 

- Sina Bastani

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