Welcome, tell us a bit about yourself

Hi I’m Emily and I’m a Strategy Intern at Loomery! I moved to London 5 years ago to study biochemistry and have been here ever since.

I’m currently finishing up my Master’s in Management at Imperial College Business School and this is my first experience working in product. Before that I was mostly working on Biochemistry research in various labs at my alma mater- my Master’s project was centred around trying to use Yeast (the very same sort used for baking) to scale up the production of a protein called alpha-1 antitrypsin. A very different experience from the world of product strategy but I’m finding parallels between the iterative approach in agile and the hypothesis-driven nature of scientific research!

‍

What are you looking forward to about being part of the Loomery team?

I’m excited to be working closely with such a multidisciplinary team in a startup environment. Product is a unique place where you get to work with specialists in software development, design, and strategy, and I’m excited to learn as much as I can from everyone while I’m here.

‍

How have you found your first few weeks?

Most interns definitely don’t get to say they went go-karting in their first week (which we did to celebrate 2 years of Loomery)! It’s been a great experience so far to be able to work on multiple projects for very different clients. For instance, I’ve relished the opportunity to work with BeZero Carbon and get an inside view on the burgeoning voluntary carbon market.

The focus on tech and digital products keeps things new and fresh and it’s made me keep up to date with the latest developments and innovations in tech.

‍

Have you been learning anything cool outside of your discipline?

Cool is a subjective term haha but I’ve gotten really into crafting recently and crocheting specifically. So far I’ve mastered a couple of granny square designs and I’m making a tea cosy. I’ve got a few birthdays and house-warmings coming up so I hope my friends like handmade coasters.

‍

What’s your favourite tool or app most people haven’t heard of?

I started using Be.real two months ago when a good friend of mine took a photo of us at the library cramming for finals for her Be.real post. It’s sort of an ‘anti-social media’ social media, where you get a notification once per day and you have to take a spontaneous photo of whatever you’re doing at that moment. It’s a nice break from Instagram and Snapchat which have become excessively curated, over-monetised, or have just fallen out of fashion with my generation. It’s a fun window into people’s days and celebrates the mundanity of life.

‍

What’s the first website you built yourself?

My first experience with making a website was creating a customised blog on Blogger.com when I was in Year 6. I think I made about three different blogs to serve whatever hobby of the week I had chosen to pursue, “journalism”, recipes, and creative writing….

My first time editing a website in HTML was in Secondary school when I made a Tumblr. If you wanted a nicely designed blog theme you had to find a template and install it by pasting in lines of script (and hope you didn’t delete anything important). Then there were all the extra features like animated cursors, and obviously, you had to have music playing on your blog (most probably the Arctic Monkeys, or some obscure indie Danish band).

‍

Recommend one podcast or book

I missed out on a lot of Historical knowledge from going down the Science route in my A-levels but You’re Dead To Me is one of my favourite ways to make up for this knowledge gap. Every episode has an expert Historian and a comedian, making it the perfect balance of informative and entertaining. One of my favourite episodes is this one about Mary Shelley. She’s so much more than simply the author of Frankenstein and very underrated IMO!

‍