University of Reading Employee Reviews for Research Assistant

Worked for 4 years as a research assistant. Friendly environment, great colleagues and supervisors. Didn't have to deal with HR too much at the time so cannot comment on that aspect

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Supportive Environment

Research Assistant (Current Employee) - Reading, Berkshire - 9 January 2023

I work within research at the uni and have found the area very supportive, there are lots of career opportunities and engagement options. The management may be a little harder to navigate but on the day to day I enjoy my work

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Insights into University of Reading

Based on 20 survey responses

What people like

Inclusive work environment
Time and location flexibility
Support from manager

Fun workplace and useful experience

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading - 4 September 2019

I undertook a research assistant role at the University of Reading for my placement. It was based in the nutritional labs within their Psychology building and the research was looking into the affects of grapeseed extract on cognitive performance, both acute and chronic affects were analysed. The roles I undertook involved: researching food flavonoid levels and recording data into spreadsheets, marking raw data on a word memory task (RAVLT) and checking raw data on the other tasks to test performance, making lunch for participants, taking lead on organising participants and ensuring they understood all aspects of the experiment, helping other researchers by taking the blood pressures of participants and setting up their experiment apparatus. Completing a 3-month work placement, with over 80 hours of work, within the University as a research assistant developed my assisting and data handling skills. I found these increasingly developed skills were very helpful before running my own dissertation project, it gave me a good amount of time to collect raw data and see the conversion between complete raw data to usable data, ready and prepared for analysis. Handling data throughout university has been a massive learning curve for me as previously I had very little experience within the psychological field of research and handling data of any sort overall. I believe this intense and rewarding experience through University of handling specific and general data can be transferred across many differing types of data, as the skills of organisation, accuracy and consistency have all been -

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University, great lecturers who are insightful and caring, poor management

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading, Berkshire - 27 March 2017

Each day would include reading multiple papers, summarising them in short concise paragraphs to be shared with the rest of the group, working with PhD students and Postdoc's and experimenting with novel methods for data analysis. 3 meetings a week with groups of academics in both formal and informal environments. The Bluesky nature of the research was liberating and resulted in conclusions that shaped the rest of my degree and way i approach signal processing problems.

Pros

Dedicated research environment with great resources, interdisciplinary work

Cons

Poor macroscopic University management

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very enjoyable

Post-Doctoral Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading - 17 September 2016

With the efficient cooperation between me and the other researcher, we have contributed to the fundamental understanding of these novel hybrid materials, including how their self-assembly impacts on both their optical and redox properties, and also created a novel technology platform for optoelectronics, centred on more sustainable metal sources (low toxicity and reasonably priced Mo) than current technologies (. precious metals or toxic Pb or Cd based Materials).

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A great volunteer position

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading - 12 July 2016

This was only a volunteer position so I cannot go into much detail. The campus is beautiful and there is a great atmosphere.

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Pathological Anatomy Division

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading, ENG - 20 September 2015

The laboratory is specialized in the histologic study of human tissues and biological samples, in order to discover eventual tumor cells. The main activities are automated Immunohistochemistry(HIC) and microscopy. The division is composed by 8 medicines and a technical staff of around 10-12 people. The typical day at work starts at 8 am and ends at 3pm. In this environment I learned to work team , relating to both medicines and technicians, and I have learned the IHC techniques with the automated machine Ventana Systems.

Pros

team working

Cons

none

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Very interesting workplace

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Department of Food Biosciences - 31 July 2015

During my internship at The University of Reading I have learned many techiniques: immunological techniques (ELISA assay), lipid profiling (ILAB), FISH, in vitro batch cultures, DNA extraction and microbiological techniques. The envoironment is very friendly and fun, and even if sometimes the job is hard, the co-workers are all very helpful.

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Great place to work and thriwe

Research Assistant (Former Employee) - Reading, ENG - 11 March 2015

I cannot speak for the entire University of Reading, but Meteorology department is great and very keen on giving the best to it's employees and research staff, consciously looking to improve everyone's work/life balance, women equality and especially supporting new mum's returning to work.

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