Profile
Heather Walton
My CV
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Education:
I went to two different primary school in Inverness, first Drakies then Inshes when it opened because it was closer to my house and was where the school bus went!
Then I went to Millburn Academy (also Inverness) all the way through to S6.
Just after I turned 18 I moved to Glasgow to study Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. I did a 5-year integrated masters course, for the first 3 years this was a mixture of lectures (in the mornings) and lab classes (in the afternoons). Then I went on a year-long Industrial Placement to work for a speciality chemical company in Liverpool. For my 5th year I came back to Glasgow and again did a mixture of lectures (mornings) and lab work (afternoons) but this time the lab work was a research project working in one of the university labs. I finished my 5th year studies last week! Although the course was long it has been really good experience, I am finishing uni with a year of work experience (which I also got paid for!) and a Masters degree. -
Qualifications:
S4 (age 15): Standard Grade Maths, English, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, Graphic Communication. Int 2 French, Spanish.
(These are all the equivalent to National 5s or GCSEs, I was just at school at the strange time where they were changing between different names!)S5 (age 16): Higher Maths, English, Chemistry, Physics, Spanish.
S6 (age 17): Advanced Higher Chemistry, Physics, Spanish. Higher Biology. National 5 Gaelic.
My school let us do whatever we wanted in our last year of school, so I took a lot of courses because I couldn’t decide between them. While I enjoyed them all, I’m not sure I would recommend it, I had a very very busy sixth year!Uni (5 years, finished age 22): MChem Pure and Applied Chemistry with Industrial Placement, University of Strathclyde.
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Work History:
Shop Assistant, Co-op Food – Worked here during my last 2 years of school and my first year of uni.
Activity Instructor/Group Leader, PGL Travel – Probably the most fun job I’ve had, but hard work! I did this in the summer between 1st and 2nd year of uni.
Research Internship, University of Strathclyde – I worked in a lab on an organic chemistry research project in the summer between my 2nd and 3rd year of uni.
Receptionist, Climbzone – I was a receptionist and giant slide operator at Climbzone during my 3rd year of university until I moved to England to do my industrial placement.
Industrial Placement Student Research Scientist, Croda – For a year during uni I worked in the development of the active ingredients for sun cream.
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About Me:
Work-wise I have just finished (this week!) a masters degree in Chemistry at the university of Strathclyde in Glasgow. I also used to work as a research scientist for a company that made the ingredients for sun cream.
Outside of work I like all outdoor activities – running, climbing, hill-walking – but since I can’t do them in lockdown I’ve been baking, reading and watching movies! -
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My name is Heather, pronouns she/her, I am 22 and I am a chemistry student who is going to graduate (well at least virtually!) this summer. I’ve done a 5 year course at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where I’ve done a mixture of taught classes (lectures and practical labs) and working on research projects, in the university and on placement in chemical industry.
At the moment I live in Glasgow. I moved here from Inverness 5 years ago to go to University, and for my first year I lived in uni halls then I moved to a flat that’s still only 10 minutes walk away. After 3 years of university I spent a year on an industrial placement working for a company in Liverpool making the ingredients for sun cream that mean it protects you from the sun! I enjoyed living in Liverpool and exploring somewhere new, but was also very happy to come back to Glasgow for my fifth year and see all my friends I’d missed while I was away.
In my summers between uni years I’ve done a variety of jobs, from a chemistry summer placement to working as an outdoor activity instructor at a PGL holiday camp. I’ve just finished my final university exams this week, and I don’t know what I’m going to do next!
I don’t have any pets but when I livedin Liverpool my housemate had a cat and I think I would like to get one in the future. I do however have lots of houseplants, I think 33 at the moment, including a palm tree that’s almost as tall as me who is called Larry! I also love octopi, but don’t think I could reasonably have one as a pet. Instead my lovely friends made me a knitted on for my birthday, he is called Raphael.
While I’ve been at uni I’ve learnt to rock climb, and now climbing, hill-walking and running outdoors are my favourite hobbies. I also like to swim and do weight-lifting training when I’m stuck in the city for uni or work. In lockdown I really miss going out into the hills, but have been remembering my old hobbies of reading, baking, knitting and sewing, as well as playing fiddle/violin, which I forgot how much I loved!
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Whilst at university I’ve worked on two different research projects with two different research groups:
Summer placement after 2nd year – The group I worked with are experts in ‘labelling’ molecules with ‘heavy hydrogen’, special atoms which you can pinpoint and ‘see’ with the right equipment. Using drug molecules with these special labels means that drug trials can ‘follow’ the drugs through the body and see whether they, for example, go to the right place or build up somewhere where they might cause a side-effect. This method is therefore useful to speed up the testing of new drugs, and saves a lot of time, money and materials.
However, at the moment the special label atoms can only be added to certain types of drugs. To speed up the testing of all drugs, chemists need to work out ways to either label new kinds of drugs or ways to make more complicated drugs out of simple ones which have already been labelled. My project was working on the second of those possibilities. I spent 9 weeks working in the lab, and by the end I had made 1 labelled drug molecule! It was hard work but very interesting, and I learnt a lot about how to do a real research project, where most things you try don’t work!Masters project in 5th year – Chemicals called ‘catalysts’ are used in a lot of chemical manufacturing processes all over the world, and without them the important chemical reactions needed to make the products – drugs, pesticides, fuels, foods – would not work. However a lot of catalysts are made of precious metals – silver and gold and also platinum, palladium, rhodium and iridium which are even rarer. When they were first invented these metals weren’t used for many other applications, and only a very small amount of catalyst is required for each factory and can last many years, so no-one worried that the metals might run out. Nowadays, however, all of these metals are used in smartphones and computers, and there is a very real risk that they will run out. This has already made them very expensive. For that reason chemists are working on new catalysts which are made from metals that are less rare, so that their use would be sustainable, as well as cheaper. My project worked on making catalysts using Magnesium. Again, this was hard which on the surface didn’t have much success, in the whole project I didn’t make any successful catalysts that were stable solids and could actually be used in a factory! But I did find out some of the reasons that cause them to break down, which will be useful in future work on these catalysts, and I learnt a lot about the subject and also how to work in a lab by myself, which is pretty important since being a student is really training for the future.
I also did a year long industrial placement working as a research scientist for a company which makes the ingredients for sun cream. I worked on making new products which contain nano/micro sized particles of metal oxides, which are physical filters to UV radiation so protect your skin from this dangerous radiation. These are very relevant at the moment because the alternative, chemical filters, have been banned in some places because they are thought to damage coral reefs. Really most sun cream you buy will contain a mixture of chemical and physical filters, and chemists need to develop better physical filters before we can stop using chemical filters. For example, sun cream made with physical filters only tends to leave white marks on your skin, which means people don’t want to wear it, but chemists are working to change the size of the metal oxide particles used to stop this problem.
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My Typical Day:
At uni I would get up and have breakfast then walk to uni for 9am, to either go straight to work in the lab or go to lecture classes for the morning. The afternoon is always lab time for Strathclyde chemistry students. In the last year I’ve been doing my own research project so I get to decide what time I spend in the lab doing experiments and in the office looking at and writing up results.
In industry I would get up a bit earlier because I had to either cycle or drive to the research and factory site where I worked. I planned my days myself apart from meetings with my team and other events which I had to work around. A normal day would involve time in the lab doing experiments and also some working on a computer studying, writing up and sharing my results -
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Final Year Uni
7:30 am – get up, eat breakfast
8:30 am – walk to uni
9:00 am – Lecture
10:00 am – hour break between lectures, I would normally go to the lab and set up some glassware for what I was planning to do in the afternoon.
11:00 am – another lecture
12:00 noon – another lecture
1:00 pm – go to the office and eat lunch
~1:30 pm – start lab work, or have a meeting with my supervisor some days. Because the lab and office are separate rooms and you have to change out of a lab coat when you go between them, I would normally do everything to start an experiment going in the lab, which would maybe take a hour, then leave it to have a break and do some data analysis or writing in the office. Once the experiment was complete I would go back to the lab and start purifying my product and do my washing up (the one thing people don’t tell you about chemistry is how much washing up there is!) then take samples and take them to the other building for analysis.
5pm – group meeting once a week, where someone presents about their project. It works out that everyone present about every 3 months so you have plenty to talk about.
5:30pm – tidy up in the lab
6pm – go to the gym or swimming
8pm – head home and get dinner, do some revision/work for classes/write up or chill for the evening.
Industrial Placement:
7am – get up, eat breakfast and cuddle cat
7:40 am – set off to drive or cycle to work
8:00 am – arrive at work if I was driving
(8:40 am – arrive at work if I was cycling!)
Where I did my industrial placement we had flexi-time, so could start any time between 8am and 10 am and finish between 4pm and 6pm. When I cycled I was normally one of the latest to start and finish, when I drove I normally got in early.8:05 am – get into the lab, turn on the computers and any equipment that I or my team would need that day if I was first to arrive. Check emails, then start work. I always planned what to do the next morning before leaving each night so that I didn’t have to think about it when I arrived. Normally this would be setting up some experiments in the lab.
11 am – tea break. Because in our building we worked in separate labs of only 3 or 4 people, this was when we could all catch up together.
11:15 am – back to the lab, probably to try and get some results recorded and tidy up the morning’s work before lunch time
~12:30 pm – lunch break. We could take up to two hours for lunch between 12 and 2. That might seem like a very long time but it was actually very useful, I even did driving lessons in my lunch times, and each week we had a running club one day and a yoga class another. But on a normal day most people just took half an hour to eat and have a chat.
~1 pm – Often meeting time, to discuss projects with managers or people from other teams.
2pm – Back to the lab to set up another experiment or do some writing up.
3pm – tea break
3:15 pm – Back to the lab to continue the afternoon
4pm – this could be home time on a day when I had arrived at 8am and only had a half hour lunch! Or when I cycled and did a driving lesson I stayed until 6pm, so was sometimes still putting on new experiments at this time!
6pm – the last person in the lab shuts down all the equipment and checks everything is safe for overnight. Travel home, and do whatever you want for the evening (I was still a student so had to spend some of my evenings doing uni work, either at home or I would stay at work to stay focussed)
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I’d like to do a hands-on chemistry activity at a science festival run by students who could also answer questions about university.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Enthusiastic, Interested, Friendly
What did you want to be after you left school?
A chemist or a chemistry teacher
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes, mainly for talking too much
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Green Day
What's your favourite food?
Rice Pudding
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
That I could be confident I was making the right decisions! That I could add a couple of hours to each day by sleeping less, but not feel tired! That I could keep up with all the lovely people I've met even though some of them are far away!
Tell us a joke.
Three cats were going to have a race to swim across a lake. There was an english cat called 'one two three', a french cat called 'un deux trois' and a spanish cat called 'uno dos tres'. On the day of the race, the spanish cat, 'uno dos tres', returned first and won. They were closely followed by the english cat, 'one two three'. However, the french cat did not return, because un deux trois cat sank!
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