As a fresh-faced 21 yr old, I did a one-year placement at a pharmaceutical company as a synthetic chemist – a position that involves a lot of what is remarkably like cooking but with ‘reagents’ (fancy word for chemicals) instead of ingredients, making potential drugs instead of cakes. I loved the placement, I loved the work and I loved the people so I set about on the pathway to getting back in to the industry. It’s eight years on, I have the qualifications to do the role, I’m applying for jobs and I’m starting to wonder ‘Is this what I want to do? and 'Can I use all the skills I've learnt elsewhere?’

This blog is going to cover my research into what scientists like me are qualified to do that’s not in the laboratory. I’ll do my best to reference websites and people that actually do these jobs and hopefully I can help some people out by sharing what I’m learning. It’ll probably be interspersed with anecdotes and rants from the lab so you can see why I'm leaving this ‘unique’ environment! If you read this, think it’s useful/funny/worth reading, pass on the link – I’d love to know if I’m any good at this writing lark.

Thursday 26 September 2013

State vs Private??

I'll be posting on what I've learnt on teaching this week at some point tomorrow, but, in the meantime, there's an interesting conversation going on in my office about the perception of state schools vs private by the students themselves, rather than the much discussed debate around university intake, positive descrimination etc..
I'm aware that a lot of value and prestige is attributed to different universities and many people are, perhaps rightly, proud of attendance at one institution over another but, what I'd like to know, out of genuine and general interest is -
       
When you were at school, if it was a state school did you feel that you might have any difficulty reaching any of your career goals, purely because you didn't have a private school background?
       Additionally, if you were at a private school, did you feel that you had an automatic leg up purely from attending such a school, in comparison to student from a state school?

No judgement, you may have changed your views now, I'm just honestly interested to understand how you felt AS A TEENAGER about the correlation between your school and what job you would be 'allowed' to do.


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3 comments:

  1. Unknown26 September 2013 at 03:40

    In the interest of participation and diclosure - I should start by saying that apart from thinking private school kids were all rich, posh kids, I genuinely didn't think about them in the terms of what I coudn't do that they could - except maybe own a pony. I didn't think my state school attendance made any difference to what I could be in the future. Rightly or wrongly, perhaps a bit naive, but I just thought that if we got the grades, we could be whatever we wanted to be.

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  2. Unknown26 September 2013 at 05:46

    My school was private but also highly selective and over half the school were there on scholarships or assisted places, with the main selection criteria being performance in the entry exams. Although this meant that we knew we were among the brightest kids in the West Midlands, I don't think that anyone thought that attending our school would give an automatic leg up (sometimes quite the opposite). Instead, though we probably also thought that getting the right grades would get us where we wanted to be, we also probably knew what targets were realistic and what was required to achieve them.

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    1. Unknown26 September 2013 at 05:57

      Thanks! I'm asking as someone on a forum suggested that speakers in state schools and at events should tell the kids specifically the kid of school they went to, so that's state school kids can realise it's possible to 'do well'. I'm paraphrasig a bit, but it started me thinking that it never occurred to me that we coudn't and I wondered how that varies person-to-person, school-to-school...

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