Five students from Truro have successfully completed their summer postings as part of one of the most prestigious science, technology, engineering and maths placement schemes in the country.

Much of the Truro and Penwith students’ work on Nuffield Research Placements, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is classified due to commercial sensitivities, but it did allow them to work alongside professional scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.

Rachel Delourme, STEM advisor, and sustainability co-ordinator at Nuffield said that Truro and Penwith College had put forward a “really good cohort”.

She said: “This is the opportunity for students to take part in exciting, cutting-edge, world-class research.

“It’s a massive achievement to complete this placement and is invaluable when applying to red brick universities and Oxbridge. With Oxbridge applications everyone has As and it is hard to stand out from the crowd, but having successfully completed a Nuffield Research Placement acts as an important differentiator. This s another great reason to try and get a placement.”

Truro and Penwith College International Baccalaureate student Jessica Wright from Scorrier was one of the five Truro and Penwith College students who achieved a Nuffield Research placement, working for four weeks for the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health.

She said: “The data is confidential, but I was looking at antibiotic resistance and measuring it in environmental risk assessments.

“I was working with PhD students doing PhDs looking at how about 70 per cent of antibiotics considered really important for human health are used for livestock. A lot of these antibiotics pass straight through the animals into the environment, but there isn’t currently any method of looking at those trace levels which could lead to the development of resistant strains.”

While Jessica admits it was pretty intimidating using advanced equipment at first, “it was quite amazing when I got used to it”.

“It’s definitely solidified what I want to do in the future, which is zoology and animal biology. Before I was more focused on field work rather than being in the laboratory, but I actually really enjoyed the lab work.”

The placement also counts towards the Crest Award, the so-called Duke of Edinburgh Award of science, as well as towards UCAS points.

Successful applicants receive a travel bursary with additional bursaries available depending on circumstances.

The four other successful applicants from the College were Bao Jacobson, who gained a computing placement at Creative Computing at Falmouth University Games Academy; Elise White and John Kemp who both worked for Mathematics and the Environment at Exeter University; and Lauren Morse who was involved in the WildCrickets Project at the University of Exeter.

For more information about STEM provision at Truro and Penwith College or the Academic Academy, contact 01872 267000 or email enquiry@truro-penwith.ac.uk.

For more information about Nuffield Research Placements, please visit the website: http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/nrp