Experiencing life at CEDA a Year 12's placement week

Posted on July 23, 2018 (Last modified on October 19, 2023) • 3 min read • 477 words

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting a Year 12 work experience student, Annsha, within the CEDA team. She wrote us a blog post, take a look below to see what she got up to…  

Hi I’m Annsha and I’ve spent this week at CEDA doing work experience. Here’s a brief overview of the tasks I did.

This week, I gathered pictures from Sentinel 2a and Sentinel 2b using the CEDA Satellite Data Finder and a software called SNAP. I gathered pictures of the Irish Sea, Mount Etna from an island called Sicily in Italy and the Atlas mountains in Morocco. These pictures were uploaded onto the CEDA twitter page (@cedanews) along with some instructions as to how I got these images and you can find this by following the address: https://twitter.com/cedanews/status/1020232122836058112 (or see images below). 

I also filled out information for some of the solar images on glass plates. These solar images were taken back in 1903 by the Cambridge Solar Observatory. Digitising this information means that other users will be able to search for these historic images of the sun over a specific period.

I’ve also attended a few meetings with my supervisor – these showed me what working life involves, but many of the acronyms and project names were confusing!

I’ve had a lot of fun going on tours around ISIS Neutron and Muon Source where they showed various instruments, shielding for a beam of protons as well as where neutrons would be scattered around. ISIS is a facility mainly used for particle physics but a variety of researchers in universities and industry visit it to aid their research. It was especially exciting to see liquid nitrogen being poured onto the floor, evaporating instantly. On the RAL space tour I saw the Sentinel 5 satellite which is currently being tested, clean rooms and large vacuum chambers where satellites are tested inside to give a Space like environment.

Finally, I went on a data centre tour where I saw JASMIN, which is used for storage and cloud computing for big data challenges in environmental science. On Friday I also went to a talk on NERC’s Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) which was very interesting. I’ve also talked with lots of different people where I found out what degree they have done and also what their PhD were about.

I’ve learned a lot from this placement, I’ve seen how physics can be applied to lots of different things in our world, for example, to assist satellites that observe the earth and atmosphere. I’ve also learned that I would like to work in a similar environment to this as it is friendly and relaxed, and surrounded by cutting-edge technology. I’ve enjoyed this experience and I would recommend this to anyone!

 

If you want to find out more about STFC’s work experience scheme, see here: https://stfc.ukri.org/about-us/work-with-us/work-experience/