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The University of Southampton
Chemistry Undergraduate study

Student placements

Snowscape

Fancy studying wine chemistry in New Zealand or joining NASA in California? You can enhance your education and gain valuable skills and experience with a placement as part of your degree. Your placement could be within industry, or at a partner university overseas.

The MChem Chemistry with External Placement and the MChem Chemistry with Medicinal Science degrees include the opportunity to spend six months working at a partner university overseas, or within industry. On the MChem Chemistry with Year-long Industry Experience you’ll spend your full final year within industry.

You’ll be working on a research project, developing your skills and knowledge, and getting a taste for life as a researcher. The experience will look great on your CV. You’ll be fully supported throughout your placement. We’ll help you to secure your placement too, through a series of pre-placement workshops on CVs, interviews and assessment centres as well as through the efforts of the dedicated placements tutor.

An intro to placements

Placement Tutor Professor Andrea Russell explains the placement opportunities in Chemistry at Southampton.

Watch video

Where can I go?

The opportunities are endless, but here are some of places where students have undertaken their placements:

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore CooperVision
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia NASA
James Cooke University, Townsville, Australia Johnson Matthey
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden AkzoNobel
Hong Kong Polytechnic University DuPont
University of Otago, New Zealand Merck
Cape Town University GlaskoSmithKline
Humboldt University of Berlin Unilever

Hear from our students

Molly: CooperVision

Molly Wilson
Molly: CooperVision

“My placement was at contact lens manufacturer CooperVision. I was able to solve a manufacturing problem that the company had faced for 20 years.”

Watch Molly’s story

Jamie: NASA

Jamie Thompson

“My placement was with NASA in California. I moved into a huge coop house full of techies, scientists and engineers, working at Google X, Apple and NASA. I learned vast amounts from them; we even built a R&D lab in our garage!”

Read Jamie’s story

Peter: University of Auckland

Peter Tunbridge

“My placement project involved using electrochemical methods to study red wines. Studying wine science was very new to me at the start and I learned a lot about how chemistry can be applied to the world of food and drink.”

Read Peter’s story
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