Going Home
Coming home to malaysia after a year.
I have successfully secured a placement with Givaudan UK ltd, or just rather known as Givaudan which head office is based in the USA. A fragrance and Flavour world class company. Interviews here are not as hard once you get the hold of their style and not panic, be prepared for any questions and answer honestly, if you are good you will be noticed. How successful i am in future employment? i am not sure but one thing is for certain, having one year working experience in the UK is worthy of putting into a CV and i perhaps could work anywhere in the world if i wish to.
I'm assigned to the Microbiolgy department, not a big achievement so to say, since i had several other offers for interviews and was actually chosen for Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital also for clinical chemistry placement. It was a twist of fate that i accepted Givaudan, if only Royal Devon called me 2 days earlier i would have accepted. Although workign in a hospital is highly biohazard and have severe few thousand samples a day to analyse... i love exeter and the condition for providing me accomodation is not bad at all. Givaudan on the other hand is based in Ashford, Kent, middle of no freaking where and houses are so expensive, it's only good point is perhaps being an hour or so from london, so i can chill out when i want to. But being self supporting is totally impossible with the high taxes.
My salary for the year is 13k pounds, very little i would say but just enough to survive. The place that i rent would be 20 minutes from the company, having around the rental of 90 pounds a week for a freaking box room. Highly miserable, compared to what i'm living now, twice the size of a box room and only payin 64 pounds per week including utility bills.
But Givaudan is a good company so i am told, helping me with my placement report and preparing me for presentations among the company and to clients. Heavily responsible to create and design own experiments as well. Seeing the flexibility and less harzardous work load in one way i am fortunate not to get Royal Devon. Having to analyse at least 3k samples a day is not a joke, even though everything is pretty much automated, it definitely needs manual verification of all results one by one.... Not to mention 10x more deadly working with life samples than with mostly harmless microbes. An office of 6 ppl beats an office with 30 ppl all experienced biomedics...
Would i stay in science? highly unlikely, perhaps into management of scienctific companies, but that is about it.
Well then how have malaysia changed besides surging oil prices of 2.70/litre? Not too keen on returning due to hot weather, temperature of 18celcius or so is just the right temperature for survival for me, any higher than that gives me heat stroke, blame it on the genes.
I have successfully secured a placement with Givaudan UK ltd, or just rather known as Givaudan which head office is based in the USA. A fragrance and Flavour world class company. Interviews here are not as hard once you get the hold of their style and not panic, be prepared for any questions and answer honestly, if you are good you will be noticed. How successful i am in future employment? i am not sure but one thing is for certain, having one year working experience in the UK is worthy of putting into a CV and i perhaps could work anywhere in the world if i wish to.
I'm assigned to the Microbiolgy department, not a big achievement so to say, since i had several other offers for interviews and was actually chosen for Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital also for clinical chemistry placement. It was a twist of fate that i accepted Givaudan, if only Royal Devon called me 2 days earlier i would have accepted. Although workign in a hospital is highly biohazard and have severe few thousand samples a day to analyse... i love exeter and the condition for providing me accomodation is not bad at all. Givaudan on the other hand is based in Ashford, Kent, middle of no freaking where and houses are so expensive, it's only good point is perhaps being an hour or so from london, so i can chill out when i want to. But being self supporting is totally impossible with the high taxes.
My salary for the year is 13k pounds, very little i would say but just enough to survive. The place that i rent would be 20 minutes from the company, having around the rental of 90 pounds a week for a freaking box room. Highly miserable, compared to what i'm living now, twice the size of a box room and only payin 64 pounds per week including utility bills.
But Givaudan is a good company so i am told, helping me with my placement report and preparing me for presentations among the company and to clients. Heavily responsible to create and design own experiments as well. Seeing the flexibility and less harzardous work load in one way i am fortunate not to get Royal Devon. Having to analyse at least 3k samples a day is not a joke, even though everything is pretty much automated, it definitely needs manual verification of all results one by one.... Not to mention 10x more deadly working with life samples than with mostly harmless microbes. An office of 6 ppl beats an office with 30 ppl all experienced biomedics...
Would i stay in science? highly unlikely, perhaps into management of scienctific companies, but that is about it.
Well then how have malaysia changed besides surging oil prices of 2.70/litre? Not too keen on returning due to hot weather, temperature of 18celcius or so is just the right temperature for survival for me, any higher than that gives me heat stroke, blame it on the genes.