V Careers Day Workplace Visits
V Careers Day Workplace Visits
On Tuesday 11 June the V spent the afternoon visiting a variety of workplaces to find out more about careers in different industries and sectors. Visits went out to ten organisations where programmes had been carefully planned to offer students the opportunity to investigate the world of work related to each industryWe were lucky enough to visit NHS Charing Cross hospital, to learn about careers in healthcare alongside Sacred Heart High School students. We listened to three presentations from doctors in different stages of their career: a endocrinology consultant, who explained to us the path and timescale of a doctor’s career, a trainee surgeon, who gave us more information about med school, and a trainee GP. It was especially interesting to learn about the (very busy) daily lives of doctors, the skills they need to be a doctor, beyond a medical degree, along with the challenges and pressures that the NHS is facing at the moment. It was amazing to see how wide a range of job opportunities there are with a medical degree even beyond a traditional hospital! Since Charing Cross is part of Imperial College London, we also heard more about the long training that doctors undertake to become doctors, and afterwards we did a VR consult with a patient’s upset family. Medical students often use VR to practice their responses to different situations and it involved completing multiple choice questions about what we’d say to reassure the family. This was not only very fun (and very difficult) but also incredibly insightful as, before, we didn’t imagine how much doctors have to practice and develop ‘soft skills’ such as empathy, especially in challenging situations. Even if we don’t choose to study medicine, we definitely all now appreciate the very hard work that doctors in the NHS do every day and have learnt about the importance of ‘people skills’ in all areas of medicine and the wider work place.
Chiara and Sophie (V)
I visited Ebury, which is a ‘fintech’ company that accommodates global transactions using new technology, along with ten other students. We were warmly welcomed by Ebury’s resident Chief Strategy Officer and we sat down to an engaging presentation. Employees from different departments delivered it, talking about what their jobs entailed and why they chose them. Before entering, I had a very fixed conception of fintech as an industry, so I was really interested to find out about alternative paths one could take along the fintech road. The departments included internal auditing, technology, financial planning, ESG, payment products, sales and even law! After the presentation, we were split into small groups and tasked with presenting a short presentation on a country we thought Ebury might consider expanding into. We considered factors such as the country’s exports, imports, culture, regulations and economic development. It was very interesting to be able to converse with Ebury’s employees and discuss our ideas with them. Overall, I feel very grateful and lucky to have learned more about a burgeoning industry that has formed new ways of bringing financial services and contributed much to the automation of investment. There are clearly many facets to fintech, and involve complex navigation of international regulation, compliance with data protection laws and early prevention of cyber-attacks. I really enjoyed this trip, and, likewise, everyone else in my year learned a lot about the workplaces they visited. The trip allowed me to consider whether fintech would be a possible career path for me, and it actually helped me to learn more about it. Many thanks to Ms Ashley and Ms Strode for organising the visit!
Ania (V)
