What were your main duties and responsibilities during the course of your internship?

My main role was to assist Lisa Butt in her ongoing experiments investigating the population dynamics of co-cultured E. coli and Salmonella, including in the presence of specialist and generalist bacteriophage. This was conducted in the lab, where my main responsibilities were setting up successive generations of cultures, plating out cultures, counting colonies on those plates and preparing samples from each successive culture for long-term storage so they can be studied in more detail in the future. Preparing liquid and solid media, sterilising pipette tips and eppendorf tubes, all for use in the experiments was also a key part of my role. I also set up several growth and infection assays.

What would you say was your biggest achievement over the course of your internship?

I was able to confidently perform experiments largely independently by the end, so my lab skills improved hugely.

What benefits did your internship bring to your employer?

As I assisted Lisa Butt with her ongoing research, I was able to lessen the workload so she didn’t have to spend her time on the more menial/unskilled work that needed to be done.