This is a guest blog by Faye Murton, current BSc (Hons) Nutrition student.

My health and fitness background created my passion to study BSc Nutrition at Bournemouth University. Throughout the nutrition course, I have gained valuable knowledge learning from the variety of units, which has also given me a great insight to all the nutrition roles I could follow after university. One interesting nutrition role was enlightened to me when I studied food product and development in my second year, around the time I was looking for a sandwich placement. This unit topic caught my eye and a large amount of the sandwich placements were related to product development, so I thought it would be an interesting route to gain some experience.

The main reason why I decided to do a sandwich placement was from speaking to nutrition students in the year above. Our lecturers at BU hosted a group session where students on their placement year would come by and talk about what they were doing. They spoke so proudly of what they had accomplished and all highly recommended taking the year out to gain experience. So, I thought it would be a great idea to gain some more experience on my CV and to get a feeling on what I might enjoy doing in my career after university.

Finding a placement was harder than I thought but the support I had from my placement advisor was so helpful. I gained help with writing my cover letters, CV and given the idea of reaching out to companies that had no placement role advertised, which is how I secured my placement. Even when covid-19 hit the UK in March, my placement advisor and lecturers worked so hard in switching their work to online and supported us through emails and zoom meetings.

After most things were put on hold by the national lockdown, I finally secured a placement in July 2020 with a local food manufacturing business called Lorama Foods. A company I seeked myself and emailed them privately to see if they were interested in a placement role. My role was New Product Development Assistant and from just finishing one of my units in food development, I was confident that the skills and knowledge I learnt were going to support me through this placement.

Lorama Foods is a manufacturing site for many large companies such as Lo Dough, TRIBE and Mountain Joe’s and all of these companies focus on sport nutrition or health related products. I had the most amazing placement experience, baking new products every day and I excelled in so many valuable skills such as organisation, team working and independence. I am confident these new skills will support me within my final year at BU and I am looking forward to the future to see where my path leads being a registered nutritionist.