Computational Science Industrial Placement - Optimising Muon Experiments Review

My role involved creating a software package written in Python to plan optimal muon experiments. This meant on a daily basis I was located in an office with other placement students, and was writing code for this project. My placement involved a lot of research on muon spectroscopy, and also on statistical and AI techniques to use in my project. I collaborated with the Muon and Research Software Engineering teams which meant I had a supervisor from each of these teams who I could meet with regularly for advice. Additionally I got to oversee and conduct experiments on the Muon Instruments, and was given many opportunities to present my work to other placement students and industry professionals both internal and external to the company.

My placement's objective was to produce a single project. This meant it was highly important for me to ensure that the results of this project were accurate and reliable. This project is to be used by many scientists in the future to help to plan their experiments, I am therefore responsible for ensuring that it's results are accurate so that these scientists don't waste valuable time on the instruments in the future. I also conducted an experiment of my own with the objective of confirming the accuracy of my project, this cost multiple thousands of pounds to the company, so it was important that I ensured it's successful completion.

I have further developed a number of software skills such as Python, python packages (e.g numpy, scipy etc.), git and GitHub, LaTeX. Which were taught well at University but this placement gave me an opportunity to develop them for a large project where I could see the real world application. I developed my presentation skills by producing posters and giving a number of talks about my work throughout the year which helped to build my confidence when presenting my work. I learnt about the importance of testing for producing maintainable code and how to write parallelised code to save runtime.

This project was well supervised by two supervisors one from the Muon Group and one from the Research Software Engineering team. My project acted as a collaboration between these two teams. I could meet each of these two supervisors on a weekly basis to show them my progress and get advice on where to go next in the project. They were also very good at explaining a lot of the complicated maths and science involved in this project.

My team were all very nice to work with. They were happy to talk to me about their own work and help me with mine. My office full of placement students was a little empty for some of the year as some of the students finished their placements, but I got on well with the other placement students in my office and found it quite a pleasant and productive working environment.

I enjoyed my placement. It gave me an opportunity to work on a project with real meaningful scientific output for the industry. I found the experiments that I conducted and oversaw interesting and thought this overall provided a great experience.

Yes