Year 9s meeting with guest speaker Dr Patricia Pascual Vargas
On Monday afternoon, Year 9 were fortunate enough to have a zoom call with Dr Patricia Pascual Vargas. She was so inspiring and spoke to us all about her job as a Cancer Researcher. Dr Patricia grew up in Madrid but was educated at a British school. She moved to London in 2010 and studied biochemistry at Imperial College, Patricia recommended Imperial College because they offered a sandwich year where you can do a trial year to see if you like the job. After studying at many other universities and getting a masters she has now settled at Cancer research UK.
If you have degrees in any of the following subjects, you can work in this medical field. The degrees are the three sciences (chemistry, biology and physics), computing, mathematics, engineering or medicine. Dr Patricia does basic research which is the first stage in the process. Then, they test the drugs are they safe, do they have side effects and do the drugs work? The third stage is to get them approved and the final stage is patient care. Patricias research is so key, it can save patients lives by 50%.
A day in the life in the labs either consists of experiments, data analysis or writing papers. Patricia finds the experiment days the most fun but, to quote her no two days are the same and some fun days involve celebrities! It feels like a family in the research team and as you progress, you find out more about the subject. However, sometimes it can open up more questions rather than answering them.
Dr Patricia said that if you want to do something like this in the future, you should do some work experience, by emailing or looking on the website or just asking! She said to try and get involved as soon as you can. Her words of advice were to always be curious, be yourself and when you think that you can’t do it or you’re not smart enough or it’s too difficult, just work hard and you definitely can and you will.
We absolutely loved having Dr Patricia talk to us and we were all so interested and inspired by her. If you are interested in her or what she does, you can visit the Cancer Research website to learn more and see the pictures of the research she does. We really need more girls and women in these jobs, at university it is still 75% male students compared to the 25% female. However, in the workplace it is 50-50!
Written by Claudia W (Year 9)
