Actually a lot of people have asked me ‘why chemistry?’ and I have to say that I loved
it from my first exposure. I think I was a kind of a ‘Why? Why? Why?’ child, I know
all children go through that kind of ‘Why? Why?’ stage but that stayed with me a long time.
And what I really found really fascinating about chemistry was that you learn about things
you can’t see, at a molecular level, but it explains the things you can see in the
world, why some things are solids or gasses, and I just found that fascinating, it was
you know, rather like magic.
I started to study chemistry as a stand alone subject at secondary school, and I had a wonderful
chemistry teacher, Mr Salmon, and it was him who actually told me the reason that there
is life on Earth is because of hydrogen bonding of water, so as soon he told me that I was
really hooked. I did a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry, and with a case award I was very
focused on a career in industry.
After my PhD I was thinking very much about the pharmaceutical industry or the agrichemical
industry, but actually as I studied more I recognised that I actually wanted to work
in an industry where I would be able to apply the chemistry and see the products that I
worked on, actually be in the market relatively quickly.
So I actually chose to work for Procter and Gamble.
At some point in your career there’s
very often an opportunity to live and work abroad. And actually, that’s what happened
to me after working for two years in Newcastle. The company said ‘would you like to go to
Germany for just a couple of years?’ You know, at that stage, as a young person I thought
‘well this is a little adventure’, to go and live for a couple of years in Germany,
so I jumped at the chance to go. And as it’s turned out, I then spent the next 23 years
out of the UK, working in Germany and in Brussels.
I’m currently responsible for all of the packaging across the company, so it’s really
a huge range from a very simple polyethylene bags that you would find around Pampers, really
right through to prestige fine fragrance, Dolce and Gabbana, and Gucci. I would say
that if you ever get the chance to live and work abroad, I would jump for it, I would
take it with both hands. You just learn so much when you’re living in a different culture,
you’re exposed to people who think differently.
So at first I think it’s just very enjoyable, but second it helps you grow just because
you have these different experiences.
So as I think about students joining Procter and Gamble,
I think the first thing to know is that Procter and Gamble is a promote-from-within company.
So we don’t bring people into the company mid-career, so that means that everybody that
is in the company today, all started at entry level, and we actually have just two entry
levels depending on academic qualifications, and then people move up different levels as
they spend their career in the company.
A large majority of the people that we hire come from our internship programmes, so we
would call that ‘mutual trial’, and it works really well because we give the students
real projects to work on, actual business projects, so we get to see them working on
a real project. And it’s equally helpful for the students because they actually are
able to experience what it would be like if they would actually decide to come and join
us at Procter and Gamble.