Cytel, USA
What did the internship involve?
Reporting to Nitin Patel (Co-Founder and CTO) and Jaydeep Bhattacharyya (Lead Software Engineer), I was required to understand and identify problems with a proprietary portfolio optimal decision-making software product, and to take the initiative in proposing and implementing solutions to these problems. This role was within the modelling and programming team.
Robbie’s reflections on the experience:
My communication and collaboration skills benefitted from this experience, and I learnt about the working environment within a private company in the software industry.
This role required having effective communication and collaboration skills to discuss potential approaches to the problem, and a strategic ability and knowledge of statistical software to implement appropriate solutions. Once solutions had been obtained, written and oral presentation skills were required to communicate them to appropriate stakeholders.
In this role, I successfully implemented an approach to extend an existing piece of software to allow for group sequential trials. In addition, with collaboration from Professor Christopher Jennison and other colleagues at Cytel, I developed theory and implemented an approach to compute ‘optimal’ group sequential trials.
We have plans to follow up the research in my doctoral studies and have future collaborations.
I would highly recommend interactions of this nature.
Comments from Robbie’s supervisor:
Robbie had a highly productive placement at Cytel and gained valuable experience working in a commercial organisation with a strong research agenda.
When I visited Robbie during his placement, we discussed with his manager an alternative approach (Dynamic Programming) to solve the optimisation problem posed. Since returning to Bath, Robbie has implemented this approach and shown that it speeds up calculations dramatically. This work has led him to extend his PhD research project in a new direction, implementing and applying this methodology.
I believe Robbie’s interaction with Cytel worked extremely well. I see the work-experience as valuable in itself and the spin-offs for Robbie’s PhD work were an added bonus. I would certainly recommend activities of this nature for our PhD students.
The opportunity to work in a fast paced, collaborative environment taught me a lot about both the internal workings of government and about best practises working in an agile environment.
I highly recommend the internship to PhD students who are curious about research impact and policy and who are looking to gain work experience beyond academia and industry.
Doing an internship during my PhD was a great way to learn about opportunities to apply my technical skills to high impact real-life problems in the finance industry and to secure a permanent role in the team I knew I enjoyed working with
Much has been achieved with this visit and more is expected to come from it. All in all, it has been a fruitful experience, and I’d be happy to recommend it to both students and supervisors.
It has been a fun and constructive year...being away from a close supervision for one year helped strengthening my discipline and independence
The opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary team where I was communicating my work to people from different departments was invaluable for my work beyond my PhD
It was a great networking opportunity and a chance to experience what it would be like to work for Roche as a company.
I was able to meet amazing people from different backgrounds that helped me so much understanding the work and made me feel welcomed
My research will benefit from this because I experienced a different and differently organised environment, with other ways (but similar) of working together to achieve the desired goals
...this placement has built a long-lasting collaboration for me which I believe will be extremely useful if I pursue academia in the future
