Life after training as a clinical scientist in Immunology. A culture change, a career change, and a location change

Hi, this is the first blog post I have written, so I hope it will be useful for anyone curious about alternative career options after completing the STP. So hello, my name is Francis, I finished the STP in Clinical Immunology in 2022 and now I work as a Scientist for a contract research organisation (CRO). We research the effects of pharmaceuticals on the immune system. But before I talk about my current role, I’ll talk about my journey to where I am now.

After completing the STP in 2022, like any trainee will tell you, it’s a hard, yet rewarding journey. We all have moments where we forgo social time to work on the long list of competencies. But the reward is the impact you have on the colleagues and patients you work with, but also at the end of all that hard work you get to graduate from your master’s and get registered with the HCPC. The natural route after finishing the STP is to find a band 6 or 7 clinical scientist role, but I was unsure what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted a well-deserved break and some time off work to figure out exactly what I wanted to do next. My department advertised a band 6 role, however, it started immediately after my STP not giving me time to rest a bit or explore other options. I loved my department in Oxford, the people were great and I felt like I truly fitted in, and everyone there had the same goal, to help people. Despite that encouraging atmosphere, which motivated me massively, I often would wonder, what else is out there? In part I felt lab work maybe wasn’t for me, and in part, I wondered if clinical science was for me? So, I started to think about where else I could apply all the new skills the STP had taught me. At first, I thought I wanted to travel abroad and experience healthcare in another country, but I realised that it takes quite a lot of nerve to uproot your life and move a 10-hour flight away. I realised I wasn’t ready to do that alone. However, it is still a dream I have for the future.

I always long to be outside in the fresh air, so, I decided I wanted to experience farming and combine the experience with travelling to Italy (as I hadn’t been before). I decided to go and volunteer on an olive farm in Tuscany in Winter of 2022. stretched.

Ultimately, I knew that no matter what I did next, I wanted to use the skills I had been learning for the past three years and apply them to immunology. But since I had finished the STP and moved back to rural Worcestershire, where immunology isn’t a popular industry, I knew I would have to move again. I knew I wanted to be in the South of England for a few reasons, at the time a new start-up had formed just 10 miles from Bristol. The company is a contract research organisation (CRO) that performs preclinical trial studies for pharmaceutical companies and Biotech’s to investigate the effect of their product/drug on the immune system using cell and 3D organoid models. I thought, wow, this sounds great, this is a chance for me to experience the private sector, a research role that uses my lab skills and immunology knowledge and also, in an indirect way, helps patients by working on pre-clinical trial drugs. So, I applied and got the job, and was excited that I would be moving to Bristol, to explore a new place, and experience a different application of immunology.

I started my current role in March 2023, and immediately I realised how different this work was. In a team of less than 10 scientists, we were performing lots of studies with tight turnaround times. As the company offer a bespoke service, most of the assays are developed for each client or developed internally to then sell to a client. The scale and dynamic of work was very different to that of the NHS. As a clinical scientist, you are used to drawing on multiple test results to come to a conclusion or help diagnose a patient. The research I am undertaking now is entirely different, for example, we create experimental models, generate analytical outputs, and produce a report, whilst simultaneously preparing for your next study. Needless to say, it was a hard, steep learning curve. Most of my colleagues had come from academia or industry, so had more experience of the types of assay we perform, so I felt like I had landed in the deep end. But I find my rather different skill set often comes in handy. In the NHS, quality and being accountable for what you do is essential. As a new start-up, I had the opportunity to help to set up the lab and the company values. As it is a new small company, your ideas and thoughts are valued, and even now after 8 months working there, I have weekly meetings with the whole company including the CEO and CSO which makes management very approachable.

The team has now grown and we have more support and expertise, we are well funded and have nice facilities, new equipment, as well as a management team who are constantly seeking to improve and adapt. So that all sounds really good, right?

There is a but, I still wonder what else is out there and ultimately, I miss helping to diagnose patients. While a pro of CRO work is the high diversity of projects, a con is that you don’t get much time to delve deeply into the question as you have to move on to the next study. Furthermore, due to the nature of the work, our clients give little information as to what their therapeutic is, so it makes it hard to fully understand the aim of the study beyond your laboratory objectives such as “Drug A shows non-specific killing of monocytes as well as the target lymphoid leukaemia cells”. So, at times I find myself wanting to know more, and also wanting to have a closer impact on patient health. So, who knows where my future career endeavours will take me, for now, I am enjoying learning a new vast set of research skills and bringing my clinical scientist quality mindset to the table. But whether there is a role that exists out there that is more clinically focused? I am yet to know myself.

I hope that insight into different life choices after the STP was helpful. I just wanted to express that it is only after you finish the STP and look back that you really see how far you have come and how much you have grown. If at times you don’t know how relevant all those competencies are, trust me, you will have learnt things and taken for granted skills that people who have not gone through the STP will not always appreciate. By working with people from academia, industry, and myself from healthcare, a dynamic range of skills are combined, all for the better of the work you are undertaking!

If you don’t know if clinical science is for you after the STP or a job isn’t available, don’t worry! There are loads of other options out there, in science, in other areas, all of which you can apply yourself to! But as I am still learning, if you don’t take a step out of your comfort zone, and try a new place, and a new job, you will never know what else is out there, and you will always be left wondering, what if I tried……

Best wishes, Francis