Lily C.
About me
| Lily C. | |
| Physics | |
| Physics | |
| Undergraduate | |
| James | |
| 2018 | |
| United Kingdom |
My employment
| Nonlinear Biomedical Physics Group Intern | |
| Lancaster University - Department of Physics | |
| United Kingdom | |
| Science and research | |
| Small business (0-49 employees) | |
| 2016 | |
| 2016 |
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A day in the life of a Nonlinear Biomedical Physics Group Intern in the United Kingdom
I found my own placement through a speculative application
My advice to students considering work
If you're struggling to find any official internships you are interested in or are limited by where you are going to be living, don't be afraid to send out speculative applications via email. Don't be disheartened if you don't hear back, but try and find and apply to things you are really interested in. If that interest comes across strongly in your cover letter/email, you're much more likely to get offered some work. Both this summer and last, I got internships based on speculative applications. In both cases, I applied to a lot and got the one I was most interested in, presumably because that interest was most apparent in my application.
Contacting me
Feel free to contact me if you'd like any more information about an internship in research or speculative applications.
What I do
During this placement, I was working on a biomedical physics study which involved analysing the cardio-respiratory oscillations of different participants during normal oxygen levels (normoxia) and low oxygen levels (hypoxia). I was specifically looking for whether these oscillations had any significant differences between participants who were born prematurely and those who were not. Using various non-linear dynamical methods, I was able to come to a number of conclusions about the data and present the findings in a report.
Skills I use and how I developed them
I learned how to use Matlab from knowing nothing about it at the beginning of the internship, including how to write scripts and functions as well as using pre-existing methods. This included using Fourier tranforms, wavelet transforms and Bayesian inference to find relationships between biological oscillations such as wavelet phase coherence and coupling. I definitely became a lot better at working on my own and using my initiative during this internship as I was often left working alone and had to figure out how to achieve the goals set out for me without too much help.
What I like most
My favourite thing about the internship was how mentally stimulating it was. I often found myself really engrossed in the work I was doing and time would fly by as I was writing a new piece of code or trying to derive the formula I needed to use.
What I like least
At times the work could be quite repetitive, particularly in the pre-processing stage of the data analysis. For example, every data set (of which there were hundreds) had to be individually checked for movement artefacts which had to be removed using a de-spiking program.
What surprised me most
I was most surprised by how much coding I actually ended up doing. I wasn't aware that in a Physics research group you could end up only really coding and not doing any practical work. This was caused by the fact that for this study, the data was provided by another institution. However, although I really enjoy coding, I am not sure I would want it to be the main focus of my job in the future.
Next steps...
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