Profile
Nicola Goodman
My CV
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Education:
I went to school in Glenrothes, Fife, to Auchmuty High School. It wasn’t the best of places to grow up but I made some great friends that I’m still in contact with 5+ years later.
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Qualifications:
When I was in high school, we were still studying Standard Grades – I studied Maths, English, Chemistry, Physics, French, Graphic Communication (technical drawing), History and Business Management.
After those, I went on to do my Highers in Maths, English, Chemistry, French and Graphic Communication.
It wasn’t until my 6th year when I decided to take Higher Human Biology, which helped me decide that I wanted to study biology at university. I also studied Advanced Higher Chemistry, Advanced Higher English, and Advanced Higher Graphic Communication.
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Work History:
My first job was volunteering in a charity shop, rearranging the stock on the floor. This gave me an idea of how to talk to people as I was still in high school and had terrible social anxiety.
When I started university, my first job was a summer job cleaning the student halls at the end of the academic year. I did this for two summers, and I learned valuable skills (like how to clean a bathroom really quickly!!) as well as meeting a lot of interesting people who studied different subjects at the university that I otherwise might not have made friends with.
I spent a day a week for about 6 months working in an accountancy firm, dealing with filing and paperwork. This was a whole different experience to my previous jobs, as I had never really worked in an office before. The work was interesting, and I learned how to make really useful spreadsheets, and I also got a free bacon roll every other week!
My last job before I set out on my career as a scientist was working in a corner shop. One of the most useful things I learned doing that job was how to speak to a lot of different people – I was good at talking to people my own age, but I had never really needed to talk to many adults or kids or elderly people that were not related to me.
I’ve found that this was a really helpful skill, for life but also especially in science, as I now spend a lot of my time talking to a lot of different people. A lot of the people who work in my department are older than me, and I also talk to a lot of high school students when we do things like career workshops, and I feel that I can relate to them a lot better than I used to.
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Current Job:
My current job is working as a lab technician. I spend most of my days planning and running experiments to test drugs on cells, and helping other people do their experiments as well. We also make different tools to help companies run their own experiments, when they don’t have the knowledge or experience to make the tools themselves.
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About Me:
Hi, my name is Nicola, and I work as a technician in a life sciences lab. I’m a bit of a nerd in my free time, I like drawing and reading and writing and playing Dungeons and Dragons!
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I live in Dundee with my flatmate, who is a PhD student. We met through our regular pub quiz on a Monday night a few years ago and now live in a beautiful flat decked out with ridiculous colour-changing lights.
My job involves growing cells to run experiments on, testing things like drugs for pharmaceutical companies to see what happens to the cells.
When I’m not working in science, I’ve recently started trying to teach myself to play the banjo. I’m not very good at music, and I definitely can’t sing, but it’s a fun skill to learn and it sounds pretty nice – also, not many people play the banjo so nobody really knows if I’m playing it wrong.
I like to draw comics, which I’m trying to do a little more often, and I really enjoy sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve recently started running my own Dungeons & Dragons group, and it’s both as rewarding as it is challenging!
I like to go for walks in the forest, or at the beach, but preferably nothing too adventurous as I’m not the most energetic person in the world… I sometimes play badminton, and I like to go for a swim in the morning before work.
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A lot of diseases are managed with the help of different drugs. In order to give out new drugs to treat these diseases, people want to know what effects a drug can cause. My job is to test drugs before they even get given to a person – and I test them on cells.
I grow cells in the lab and look after them, so that I can test drugs on them and see what happens. That way, we can work out if a drug does what somebody hopes it will do, like kill cancer cells. Once we have an idea of what it does, we can then try to work out HOW it does these things – do we know what specific part of the cell the drug is interacting with and can we work out how much drug is needed to have this effect?
Sometimes I also go out to high schools and teach classes on things like reaction times – this helps give an idea of what it can be like for those that might have relatives with motor diseases such as Parkinson’s.
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My Typical Day:
To wake up for a day of running experiments, I get up and go swimming at the local pool. I then spend a few hours at my computer planning experiments, and go look at the cells I’m growing to hope they’re all okay.
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Most days before work, around 8am, I go swimming in the pool on campus. I’m not a very good morning person so this helps to wake me up and be ready for the work day. I start work at 9am, replying to emails and planning experiments for the rest of the day or the week.
I then spend a lot of time getting samples together and running those experiments, or checking on the cells I’m growing and make sure they’re doing ok.
I spend lunch time eating with a group of friends, who all work in different departments to me.
In the afternoon, I continue running experiments until around 5pm, at which point I go home and eat a ridiculous amount of food.
I spend most of my evenings either playing video games or watching something on YouTube. I particularly enjoy Minecraft or any other survival/crafting games.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Nerdy, chatty, funny
What did you want to be after you left school?
Originally I had wanted to be an architect or an electrician... But here I am, a scientist!
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Almost never - but if I was it was for talking too much
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Bastille
What's your favourite food?
Garlic bread
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