Hi, I’m Finn, a Natural Sciences student. I’m currently doing a placement as a Medical Microwave Imaging Research Technician & Project Coordinator in Physics here at York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I decided to undertake\na placement year for two key reasons. The first was to gain the technical\nskills associated with this particular project, particularly the computational\nside of it. As well as that, the project management skills I\u2019d gain from a research\nand development role were really appealing. I had been itching to get involved\nwith a project where I can learn and establish my machine learning and\nscientific programming abilities with the aim of building a working product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had become aware,\nduring the course of my degree, that the steps involved from taking a concept\nfor a technological innovation to a product in the real world were, one,\nsomething I found really interesting and, two, something I hadn\u2019t been able to\npractice yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the Easter\nholidays of my third year of university, my supervisor emailed me with the\nsubject \u2018Interesting idea?\u2019. Since I had previously expressed interesting in\ndeveloping technology for medical applications, he thought I would be\ninterested in the chance to develop prototype for a microwave medical imaging\ndevice, based on the patents shared between the University of York and\nSylatech, where I would be sponsored by Sylatech to undertake the project for 9\nmonths. This of course meant the final year of my degree would need to be\ndelayed and I would be graduating in 2020 rather than 2019. But, needless to\nsay, I was indeed interested!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The great thing about\nthis project so far, 5 months in, is that my focus changes week-on-week. On a\ntypical day, I arrive at either the York Plasma Institute (YPI) or the YPI\u2019s\nnearby laboratories at 9am. If I\u2019m turning up at the labs, I\u2019ll be testing or\nconducting an experiment on recently-printed circuit boards with an antenna array,\nmicrowave synthesisers, and an anechoic chamber (which is one of those rooms\nthat absorb reflected electromagnetic waves).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been able to gain\na lot of technical skills that I wouldn\u2019t have been able to gain during my degree\nor my spare time. Designing circuit boards for microwave electronics and\nanalogue-digital converters has given me an insight into processes required by\ntechnology companies across the world – and I can get my hands on the real\nresults of choosing, routing, and soldering specialised components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So far, it\u2019s opened up\nmy awareness of future careers, my own skills, and my own interests. It\u2019s\ncertainly made me see the benefits of both a PhD and working in industry even\nwithout explicitly choosing one of these two routes. I have a much clearer idea\nof what I\u2019d want to be working on when going down either of these two paths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi, I’m Finn, a Natural Sciences student. I’m currently doing a placement as a Medical Microwave Imaging Research Technician & Project Coordinator in Physics here at York. Why did you decide to do a placement? I decided to undertake a placement year for two key reasons. The first was to gain the technical skills associated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,58,868,8,711],"tags":[31,670,185,83,720],"class_list":["post-5067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-natural-sciences","category-physics","category-placement-year","category-study","category-work-placement","tag-careers","tag-natural-sciences","tag-physics","tag-placement","tag-work-placement","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n