A Student's Work Placement at Thermo Fisher Scientific

Simona Dimitrova, a third-year Applied Data Science & AI student, completed a software engineering internship at Thermo Fisher in Eindhoven as part of the Global TEM Software Integration and Test group — work that combined coding, planning, collaboration and AI integration.

The work

Simona worked on an internal software tool used across departments, improving its accessibility for non-technical users. The tool’s complexity was a known problem; as she notes, “the team ran several knowledge and training sessions” to address it. Her main contribution was a feature that “generated test automation by providing scenarios and test libraries” without requiring users to write code.

The feature was well received and fitted the company’s wider move from manual to automated testing.

What she took from it

Technically, she gained exposure to test automation, software integration and Thermo Fisher’s internal frameworks. Beyond the code, she came away understanding how a large organisation actually runs — project management, release processes, and the coordination around them. That organisational knowledge, she emphasises, proved “just as crucial as the coding itself.”

Challenges

The early obstacles were domain ones: material science and transmission electron microscopy were unfamiliar, as was navigating the organisation itself. The larger challenge was owning a full project plan — from requirements through coordination — rather than executing tasks that had already been scoped for her.

What’s next

The placement confirmed her intention to build a career bridging engineering and data science; it was, she says, “exactly what I was looking for” and “aligned perfectly with my expectations.” She plans a second work placement in her final year.