I'm Niki, I'm a research assistant in the Cancer Genome Project
at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
in Cambridge.
My job has a lot of variation to it, and that really keeps things fresh.
It can be extracting DNA and RNA from tissues
and bloods,
it can be setting up loads and loads of
reactions on a robot,
or it can be quite computer and admin
paper based.
Extractions are my favourite part of the
job, because you get to see the science
happening right in front of you.
We normally get a tumour or a blood sample in, 
and sometimes we get normal tissues as well.
And what we do first, is we break it up
into really small chunks,
so the chemicals we use can actually get
into the cells and pull the DNA out.
Once we've got it out, we check what we've
got and if its good quality
and then it goes off for sequencing.
We use robots in the labs to make our lives easier, the
other day I had a ticket in for 1344 reactions,
which if I had to by
hand would have taken weeks.
But with the robots it's a lot
easier,
you just tell it what to do, it goes and
does it for you
and it only took me a couple of days.
In the lab we have a ticketing system,
there's two sides to it,
a digital side and a paper side. The digital side normally 
comes first,
and on that we have the big list of
everything that is going on or will go on
and you take the highest priority ticket and it's really 
simple just drop down and take it.
Then the paper side comes in, you take that through with you into the lab,
and you sign off things as you're doing them,  if
you're not done by the end of the day
you put it in the "in progress" draw and when it's
finished you
take it and put it in the "finished draw" and then
update the digital one
and say everything is done. So I really like it
because it gives nice structure
to the lab and you know exactly what's
going on.
I have a degree in genetics and my first job, shortly after graduating, was at a cold and flu
research company. I was running the lab
at a satellite screening site,
and because it was satellite it was quite lonely, I was the only person that was
always in the lab,
and it got to the point when I was like "I'm not
really using my degree".
Genetics and Sanger, it's kinda of a 
goal, it's a really big deal if you do genetics, to get here.
So I kept
trying and trying and trying, I think I had about
3 interviews and 8 applications and
eventually I got it.
I really enjoy what I'm doing now, I'm finally at a place where
I'm using my degree and it's paid off, all that hard work.
But I'm now at the
point where
I've got it decide if I want to stay at the Sanger and carrying on working and
growing with them, or if I want to go
back into education, get a master's,
get a PhD and go and get more into the academic and research side of things myself.
But either way,
I've got Sanger on my CV and that's going to give me 
so many opportunities
that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
