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.
Placement Tutor Professor Andrea Russell explains the placement opportunities in Chemistry at Southampton.
Watch videoThe 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 |
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.”
Jamie: NASA
“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!”
Peter: University of Auckland
“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.”