After I finish university two major routes that I will be considering are further education as a PhD student and a career in the electronics industry. I have previously had experience in industry, so with a long summer in between years I decided to spend this time productively, by gaining an insight into the life of a PhD student. I found out about the university's UROP (undergraduate research opportunity placement) scheme. The application process is very easy and the academic staff seemed very keen to offer placements. This allowed me to gain a placement into the exact area I wished to experience - signal processing.

The role of the PhD student was very independent with a lot of freedom. I was typically assigned a lot term goal, which I had several days or even weeks to complete. Soon into starting I had multiple objectives with varying deadlines. There were a variety of tasks I undertook; some were as part of a small group, some were individual. I had a responsibility to complete tasks in order for others to progress further as well as finish my own projects. There is a lot of flexibility in how I worked. I chose my own hours around my workload and scheduled meetings. All of this led to developing my time management skills.

Not all the work was strictly technical. Entering into the position it was evident I did not possess nearly enough knowledge to progress effectively. Hence I spent a large amount of my time reading up on the topics I was working on. I worked through the technical challenges when I was able to. I had to collect and analyse a large amount of data to support my conclusions, hence I spent a lot of time in the labs. I then used my conclusions to give presentations and write reports on what we had achieved.

Of course working in a group with other PhD students presented plenty of opportunities daily to ask all the questions I could think of to better understand how the various courses work. The summer exercised all aspects that I had learnt in my undergraduate courses and offered a well-rounded experience into the life of a PhD student in the EEE department.