Thomas Rates - Summer STEM Work Placement Student - 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!

Week One 

"My first week has been incredibly interesting. My project has been about the use of organic transistors as a way of converting AC power to DC, as organic materials can be ink jet printed. This week I have been learning how  to use simulating software to model components and I have also been doing research into the project, looking at various papers and websites to do so.Towards the end of the week I have had some success modelling an example from one of the papers. Next week I should be able to use this in a simulation circuit to see the efficiency of it, and see if there is anything that can be done to improve it. I have really enjoyed the project so far and I look forward to the remainder of it."

Week Two

"My second week has also been very good. This week I have been developing my simulation and working out some of the problems it has had. I have also been looking more closely into how my component will behave in a circuit and trying to simulate this as well.

During this week I have also modeled a real circuit on a bread board to see the outputs of it. This will carry on into next week taking measurements to see what values I should be expecting and to generally get hands on experience with what I will be trying to simulate.

This week has been interesting and has been very productive in setting me up for running simulations and experiments next week."

Week Three

"My third week was very productive. I have worked on simulating my component in a circuit and seeing how it behaves. This has given me very interesting results that will end up going into my final report.

 I also took measurements from the circuit I created on a bread board, to see how it changes AC to DC power and how this can be optimised. Although this was not my component, it was close enough to achieve very good results, and works well as a proof of what I’m doing. 

My project is close to an end now and my results have been very promising and I am looking forward to seeing its conclusion."

- Thomas Rates