Iffah Batrisyia Asmawi recently graduated from the University of Southampton with a degree in Mathematics with Statistics. Originally from Brunei, Iffah came to the UK primarily to study but became curious about working life here and decided to apply for a Marketing Internship with NuNano.
We asked Iffah to tell us a little bit about the internship and her experience of being part of the NuNano team for a month…
Marketing is a field that I’ve never considered before. Despite that, I wanted to try my hand in it anyway, because many people said that marketing would be looking at a lot of customer data, and figuring out patterns and trends. The main base of the internship was doing analysis, which sounds similar to what I’ve been doing in my own course.
The purpose of the internship was a project to analyse customer information stored in the database to help the company better understand their customers and know what information and support might be useful for them in the future.
Am I doing the right thing?!
I went into the internship not really knowing what to expect, and when the first week rolled around, I kept asking myself if I was doing the right thing. Week One was focused on learning, how the CRM was structured, basic marketing concepts and terminologies and how to export data from the CRM.
Armed with this knowledge I spent the next few weeks running reports on customer data. Where most of them were coming from, what was the most popular product, what kind of samples they were using our probes with and more.
A key element of the job was developing my knowledge of AFM.
Before applying for the role, I had no idea what AFMs were. Surprisingly, I got the gist of it on the first day. Once you get the fundamentals of what the AFM does, it’s easy to get the other details that follow. It was especially helpful as the team patiently answered all the questions I had, and even got the applications engineer to sit down with me on a call and talk me through the whole process of AFM.
An ‘Outsider’s guide’ to AFM
The most basic way I can explain AFM from the eyes of an ‘outsider’ is this: atomic force microscopy (AFM), is a method of scanning the surface of a sample at an atomic level. Instead of using light like the typical microscope you’d see in a lab, AFMs use probes, which are what NuNano sells.
The probes are very tiny needles that, with the help of the machine, can trace out the shape and structures of a sample, and enable us to see its depth. Of course, there are other applications to this tool, like measuring conductivity within the sample, but as a general overview, this is how I understand AFMs.
My favourite time during the internship was when I came up to Bristol and visited the company. I got to see the labs and meet the team members I’ve only seen through my computer screen. The atmosphere of the office space was nice, and had I been doing a permanent position, I would’ve definitely enjoyed coming to work and enjoyed the company I was with. The team themselves are very friendly and made my short time at NuNano comfortable.
Went by like a breeze
Unfortunately, 4 weeks went by like a breeze and we ended up not fully completing the full scope of the project. Throughout, we uncovered there was more information to work with than expected. I would’ve liked to reach the hard analysis section of the project, but the 4 weeks was not enough to cover it, and trying to cram everything in that duration would’ve been too much.
Nevertheless I found the data reporting to be a good thing. I really felt like I was making a good contribution to the company with the information that I was able to provide. I learnt a lot while working here. I got basic marketing and business insight, and could further my knowledge on data reporting.
I’m glad I got to work with NuNano. This was an opportunity that I highly appreciate and would definitely recommend many to try out, even if they’ve come from a different background and they have no idea what AFMs are. Being able to learn and adapt is the key skill that I got coming out of all this.
If you are interested in carrying out an internship with us, please take a look at your careers service. They may offer internships which we can apply for funding for, or send us an email at careers@nunano.com to see what we can offer.
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