Synthetic Medicinal Chemist

I'm a medicinal chemist, which means I invent or discover biologically active molecules that will hopefully become new medicines.

Most of the time my day is spent in the lab actually at the bench doing hands on mixing, heating chemicals, stirring them and seeing if the reactions have worked, and then obviously a little bit of time spent out the lab, reading literature, researching and obviously writing up my experiments for other scientists to follow.

To be in my job, you probably obviously need all your practical skills but I think also you just need to be really interested in it, you need to want to know why a reaction is going to work, why didn't it work most of the time, and you've got to have an enquiring mind and a real desire to sort of want to find out why, why is one particular molecule, better than another molecule.

I sort of now supervise people for say, a week at a time, I certainly didn't do that at the beginning. Other skills like computer skills - I'm in charge of a piece of equipment in the lab. And so I'm sort of the expert, so to speak on that piece of equipment so that certainly builds up to, hopefully, supervising more people, and becoming more responsible within the department.

I love it. Absolutely love, it it's a really good job very enjoyable and you're doing a lot of practical hands on stuff so doesn't get too boring.

I've always liked chemistry so I definitely wanted to do something within a chemical field, and I think within pharmaceuticals, it's quite a beneficial job so doctors wouldn't be much use if they didn't have any new medicines to prescribe and so I feel it's beneficial to society as well as a job I can enjoy.

I think just do it if you like using your hands and you want to be in a job that's changing all the time and it's exciting, then definitely just go for it.