Industry Perspective

I didn’t know what I expected on Thursday when I traveled to Bridgewater, NJ to visit GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) Medical Affairs office. This was my first opportunity to get a day-in-the-life industry perspective during my time in graduate school. If you read any of our previous blog posts or even just the description of the iJOBS program, you will understand that its sole purpose is to expose graduate students and post-docs to non-academic career options.

The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Career Panel: Product Development, Tech and Sales Support in Life Sciences Companies on October 3, 2017. Do you like communicating with other scientists about their projects? Do you enjoy being an expert in a particular method and explaining that method to non-experts? Do you enjoy meeting new people? Then boy, do I have a job for you! If you have overlooked sales and tech support as a job opportunity, you may be missing out on a rewarding, meaningful, fun, and interesting career choice.

ACA Lunch and Learn Event

This post was written following the ACA Lunch and Learn Event, Opportunities in Drug Development, on July 13 with Sam Kongsamut, PhD.

By: Yaa Haber

This piece was written after attending an iJOBS workshop entitled: How to Get and Keep a Job presented by Nancy Mark from Johnson & Johnson on June 29th, 2017 in Piscataway, NJ. As graduate students and post docs, we work in a semi-professional environment, wearing the uniforms of bright t-shirts, coffee stained jeans, and disintegrating shoes. Transitioning from this scholarly environment to one that requires tailored clothes and dry cleaning can be daunting, requiring more than just a simple trip to Nordstrom’s.

This piece was written after attending an iJOBS workshop entitled: An Introduction to Good Laboratory Practices presented by Melissa Elliott from Envigo on May 8th, 2017 in Piscataway, NJ. Good laboratory practices (GLPs) are a series of regulations which standardize the quality of research used in clinical trials, or food development. Before human consumption, or treatment, there are several stages of research: exploratory, preclinical development, clinical trial, and manufacturing. The latter three stages are all federally regulated.

This past February, nearly fifty graduate students and post-docs braved the winter weather and attended a four day long workshop called SciPhD to learn how to frame skills gained in academia to be marketable towards careers in industry.

I got my job in industry through networking, and I’m not ashamed to admit that (or at least, I’m trying not to be).

We have all been told at one point or another that the skills we develop in graduate school can be translated into industry value if we communicate them properly. However, I have always wondered about the credibility of this statement. How can technical lab skills be helpful in non-academic career tracks?

On November 29, the New Brunswick site of Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) hosted students from Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland. BMS is a global bio-pharmaceutical company whose drug portfolio includes oncology, immunoscience, cardiovascular, genetic diseases, and fibrotic diseases.