To help other students and building on my mentoring experience, I ran weekly study sessions for first-year biochemists. I planned the sessions based on topics they said they found more challenging and ran the sessions with the intention of facilitating discussions between students through the questions and problems I posed. I also offered advice on first-year university life in general, including work-life balance, and on module choices for second-year biochemistry. I was pleased to receive positive feedback from the PASS coordinator about the help I offered my students.

MTD provides global scientific consultancy and testing services including DNA analysis.I had a three week DNA lab internship, developing DNA extraction and purification techniques as well as observing the breadth of projects within the company.For two of the three weeks, I carried out an independent project extracting and quantifying microbial DNA from various soil types. To ensure I kept to the two-week deadline, I planned my time carefully including both an overall time plan as well as a daily plan to keep my progress on track. I presented my findings to my supervisor, having identified how much DNA could be extracted from each soil type. I found it interesting how microbial extraction and identification could help with other projects, such as insurance claims into where fuel contamination occurred. Based on the microbes extracted from the biofilm within the fuel, it is possible to trace where the contamination occurred by comparing those microbes with samples collected from different locations where the fuel tanker had docked. This was something that had never occurred to me as a possibility to do and was very interesting to observe the parts of the process of identifying the contamination location.