Jonathan Campbell

MChem Chemistry (Year Abroad)
Graduated 2014

Having graduated from the University of Leicester in 2014 with a 2:1 MChem with a year abroad, I went almost immediately into the working world. I had secured my first job as a product manager for Scott Bader. They are a polymer manufacturing company, I was in charge of looking after the Gelcoat and Crestapol Resin Range, the latter being mainly focused around the advanced composite market, and in particular, carbon fibre. This was quite a nice transition for me as I had wanted to pursue a more business-oriented/commercial role after my chemistry degree, as I did not feel a career in research was what I wanted to do. I worked at Scott Bader for 16 months, during which time I was lucky enough to have the chance to do some fairly extensive travel abroad, mainly in Europe. My degree was extremely useful in this role as a sizeable part of any product management role involves daily interaction with technical. In my case, this meant a lot of interaction with our research and industrial chemists. Being a chemist myself proved to be a huge advantage as I was able to contribute and be involved in product development not just from the commercial side. 

During my time at Scott Bader my music career had really started to take off as well. I am an electronic music producer in my spare time, in particular drum and bass. This has started to see some success which has led me to my next career move. As of February 2016 I took on a product management role at Focusrite Audio Engineering, the number one brand in the world for audio interfaces, which is a particular type of music technology that allows you to convert digital signals to analogue and analogue signals to digital for music recording and production. This career move has allowed me to marry up my passion and my work in a really fantastic way. I have been able to carry across a lot of product management knowledge to this new role and also a lot of knowledge of music and music production from being a producer myself. 

So far it’s fair to say my career path has been less that straightforward from starting out as a Chemistry graduate but so far I am enjoying it immensely and am achieving a lot of life goals at this early stage in my music career.