R&D and Quality Control Intern

The work

Grupo Juste manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients and contrast media — a highly regulated chemical-pharmaceutical environment. I was the first secondary-school student the programme had ever admitted.

I worked across both R&D and Quality Control, on regulated products for human and animal consumption, to strict compliance standards. That meant operating the analytical instrumentation the validation depends on — HPLC, gas chromatographs and AOX analysers — and delivering the data analysis behind product validation, rather than watching someone else do it.

Alongside that I contributed to the development of new chemical-pharmaceutical products and supported plant operations, applying safety protocols and process optimisation.

What it taught me

The honest headline is the learning curve. I arrived at seventeen into unfamiliar terminology, unfamiliar software and laboratory concepts I had not met, and the first weeks were spent closing that gap rather than contributing.

What I took from it was a method for entering a technical domain cold: find the smallest complete thing you can do correctly, do it until it is reliable, and expand from there. It is the same approach I used later on a 3,000-line codebase and on a hospital’s equipment inventory.

I also saw a regulated production pipeline end to end, which is why compliance-heavy environments do not feel foreign to me. In pharmaceutical manufacturing the documentation is the product as much as the compound is.