Quintessa welcomes Rosie Burt from the University of Bath and Tafheem Ali from the University of Manchester as they start placements with us. This will form part of Rosie's undergraduate course in Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science, and follows the successful completion of Tafheem's Earth and Planetary Sciences undergraduate course; she will then be returning in autumn 2025 to undertake a Masters degree.
Quintessa also welcomes back Josh Nicholas who is rejoining the company for a two-month summer placement, following his own industrial placement year with us in 2022/2023.
Rosie and Tafheem will be working with us on a range of mathematical modelling, geoscience, decision support and software development projects over the coming 12 months.
Josh will be contributing to several mathematical modelling projects, in particular Quintessa’s support for EDF Energy’s advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactors. Following his summer placement, he will then be completing an MPhys research placement supervised by the company, contributing to Quintessa’s work in Well Decommissioning.
Quintessa has a long history of employing university students on placements. Such placements are mutually beneficial; the students gain relevant experience in a professional environment as well insight into the fields in which we work and how mathematics is used in industry. The company's size means that the students can actively participate in a wide range of business activities. For its part, Quintessa benefits from talented individuals wishing to undertake such placements, using the opportunity to progress interesting research and development projects and to capitalise on the value of a fresh outlook. Hosting placement students is part of Quintessa's STEM outreach activities designed to inspire future generations to engage in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects.
In the past, students on placement have made significant contributions to the development of three of our free software downloads, Graph Grabber, LATIN and Portfolio Picker and to updating our website. Behind the scenes they have been involved in various mathematical modelling initiatives and supporting the testing of Quintessa's software. To date, three placement students have also gone on to become permanent employees following completion of their studies; Neil Chittenden, Rebecca Newson and most recently Louise Bruffell.