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Mansfield wins global award for campaign to secure its future as the leader in widening participation to Oxford University
2025
First year Physics student Qingyang Zhang reflects on her internship as a research assistant on the Preventable Deaths Tracker project.
Read moreThis summer, I had the amazing opportunity to intern as a research assistant for Dr. Georgia Richards on the Preventable Deaths Tracker project. It was a chance to use my programming skills to participate in research and make an impact, however small. I looked at prevention of future deaths reports from the UK’s judiciary office, and gleaned insights into the large-scale trends of these death reports using python (e.g. geography, cause, how persons responded to these reports etc.)
My internship was remote and I was the only intern, which has its unique challenges and benefits. Having no peers meant that I had to be self-motivated to work through 40-hour weeks on my own, and it did get lonely at times. On the other hand, I had a lot of contact with my supervisor Georgia, who mentored me one-to-one. She even offered to help me if I wanted to publish my findings in an academic journal.
Researching in a new field was also a challenging but rewarding process. It involved learning on the job, A LOT. My first task was to web-scrape from the judiciary website and update its output to the research team’s website using WordPress (a website creator). I had never web-scraped or used WordPress before… Having analysed perfectly presented data in Physics labs, I was also surprised by how messy real-world data is. The data I was dealing with was filled with empty values, typos (‘mental heath’ really got me), and inconsistent punctuations (imagine writing your bucket list as A; B | C – D and E). Grooming the data to produce any figures at all was extremely difficult, but it made the insights I gained feel more valuable.
As someone who always wanted to do a PhD, this internship made me understand the realities of research a bit more. It also dramatically upgraded my python skills and made me more resilient in the face of challenges and mistakes. I would recommend Mansfield students to apply for research assistant positions if you are considering a career in academia.