Day in the life of a Graduate Analytical Chemist

My particular branch is pharmaceuticals. We look at the drug substance, so we look to make the drug from basic building blocks and ensure the quality of this drug substance is suitable for use in clinical trials. So we get the drug and we have to look for possible impurities in there, so we have a wide variety of analytical techniques that we use, separation science, we look at spectroscopy to see for low levels of impurities, possibly things which could cause harm if they went into patients, and we can analyse these down to really low levels, parts per billion in some cases. We're not doing the same analysis over and over again. One day I might be releasing a drug from a pilot plant, and they might have made like 200 kilos of drug, and the next day I might be helping a student project out, so days are quite different. The way I got into analytical chemistry, or chemistry as a whole, was I'd done chemistry, maths and physics at A-level. I'd done chemistry at York with a year in industry, and I came here, and really enjoyed the job, really seemed to fit into the sort of thing I wanted to do because I enjoyed the challenges, I enjoyed problem solving, and it just stayed with it from there, and I've been here about 10 years now. The skills we think you need for this job, I think you need to be pragmatic. A lot of the things we do, if we're looking to make fast analysis, so if we're, say for example, in the plant, and they want to know as quick as possible their reaction's completed, you want a method which is quick, so you need to really be able to pick what do I actually need to do here, and if you can do that, you've won half the battle. Logical thought helps, making sure you make the right decisions. I think if you can do them two things, you wouldn't do a bad job at it. If you want to get into this job, or I think most jobs in the chemistry sector, the year in industry I think can be one of the better ways to do it. It can be like a year-long interview, you know, if you enjoy the company you work for, these guys see you for a year, see what you're doing, it's best to make the most of it. Working as an analyst, there's many different things you can do, so you can go down the management path, the scientific ladder, so what this means is hopefully your strength will be utilised, whatever that is. So if you're great working in project teams, you can go towards project management. If you prefer to be on your own and you prefer to just get stuck into your science, there's a scientific route which you can take. The thing I like about the job, I think it feels, there's constant challenges, and it's sort of like puzzle solving. So if you've got to look for, we might have an impurity which we're worried might be, you know, toxic or cause harm, we might have to look for this in a drug bound to, sometimes parts per billion, and that's a real challenge. So it's knowing, having the skill to find what that challenge is, and to actually use the right instrumentation to try and find the right answer. At the end of it, when you actually find out that you can actually do this, you can actually get the answers you need, and what helps projects move forward, that's a big thing.