Environmental Undergraduate

Hi, I'm Alice Eldridge, and I'm the environmental undergraduate at Pfizer. So I'm currently studying environmental geography with placement year, at the University of York and I've been in my current role for around eight weeks, so I'm pretty new to the industry. My role as part of the EHS team, so I sit within environmental health and safety involves helping Pfizer meet their environmental targets. So, this can either be through SECR, streamlined energy carbon reporting, or other carbon reduction strategies. In addition to this, I also work on coming up with kind of sustainable, innovative ideas to help their impact and emissions and ultimately reach our goal of being net zero by 2040.

The majority of my work is carried out within a team so with my EHS team, and I feel like this really helps us achieve the best outcome is it creates a space that we can learn from each other, because someone may say something that you haven't quite thought about before, which is really great.

So the one piece of advice I would give to someone who's interested in seeking out a career in the pharmaceutical industry, from a student's perspective is to just go out there and try and get some experience. So this could either be through talking to someone who works in the industry, or even going onto LinkedIn and contacting someone through there, say you're interested in a specific role, setting them up kind of dropping the message and kind of learning through them. Other opportunities, for students, include internships, or even volunteering, so emailing, like the careers department being like, "I would love some work experience. Is there any opportunity?" Because you never know. So this will offer great insight into the pharmaceutical world of work. And personally, from my experience, it's been amazing so far, I've been given so many opportunities to get involved with a load of different projects, working with different teams and different departments across a lot of fields. And I'm just, there's so many opportunities.   

I would definitely recommend working in this industry as you really feel like you're making a difference and helping people no matter the role, so I obviously don't sit within developing drugs or with the vaccines but I didn't but I still feel like I'm have a purpose which is exactly what you want out of career.