The 2022 Wellcome Trust away was held on Wednesday 26th September at the Watershed on the harbourside. The day was an opportunity for our current students to showcase their research and featured talks from programme alumni as well as academic and industrial speakers.
The day started with 5-minute flash presentations from our first years – who got asked lots of questions, and suitably warmed up the audience! We then got the opportunity to hear from our industry speaker Helen Boyd from AstraZeneca, who importantly highlighted that science doesn’t always work, but is always inspiring. After lunch break of mingling and looking at the second-year posters, we kicked back off with our academic speaker, Laura Greaves, from University of Newcastle, and her fantastic research into mitochondria and cancer metabolism. A quick coffee break to refuel and then we heard from our final years who each gave an enthusiastically received 20-minute presentation. Finally, we heard from our programme alumni Jess Campbell, who spoke about the good, the bad and the ugly side of secondary school teaching – very inspiring and at least one of us was entirely won over and considering teaching as a career.
We finished our day off with a drink’s reception and a delicious Mexican at Chido Wey.
For the following activity day, we ate our body weight in pizza before heading off to try Axe Throwing! Thankfully no one was hurt! Congratulations to Kincaid and Becks for being champion axe throwers!
It was a great couple of days catching up about science and introducing the newest intake of Wellcome students to the course, and our SAB to us students.
We would like to thank Helen Boyd from AstraZeneca, Dr Laura Greaves from the Wellcome Centre for Mitochondrial Research Biosciences Institute at the University of Newcastle, and our alumni Dr Jessica Campbell for helping make the away day so great.
Looking forward to next year’s away day!