iJOBS Event Summary

By Huri Mücahit Edited by: Tomas Kazsa, Maryam Alapa, and Eileen Oni   The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Seminar: How to Prepare for the Industry Job Market For many Ph.D. students, a career in the pharmaceutical industry is considered to be the ultimate goal. However, the job search and application process can be more daunting and lengthy than we would like.

The following is a re-cap of an iJOBS event—Regulatory Writing Workshop—held on January 30^th, 2018 on Busch Campus. Doreen Lechner, director of the Biopharma Educational Initiative and Clinical Trial Sciences Program at Rutgers, moderated the event and provided information on relevant courses offered at the university.

By: Huri Mücahit The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Workshop: Strategic Online Networking to Propel Your Career on January 18th, 2018. With this workshop, iJOBS once more offers the opportunity to expand networking skills with the program 2Actify. Following the success of the pilot program launched this past summer, (see Fatu Badiane's experience with 2Actify), the founder, Penny Pearl

When I imagine myself in industry I often see myself wearing a suit performing a task, but the details of those tasks are unclear. After speaking to other trainees about what tasks they envision performing in industry, they describe job definitions, but not specific tasks. This becomes problematic because while you may think that you are a good fit for a profession, performing those unknown duties might make you feel differently. I am surely not the first PhD student to ask the question: what job duties would I do in industry, more specifically Medical Affairs?

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.

Huri Mücahit and Yaa Haber If you’re looking for a career in which you can plan, organize, and oversee all aspects of a project to reach a specific end goal, then project management is the career for you! In this iJOBS workshop, Kristin Fitzgerald, Director of Global Project and Alliance Management at Merck & Co., covered the day-to-day aspects of project management within a pharmaceutical company, as well as the skills required to succeed. In order to understand project management, it is first necessary to define the term ‘project’.

This post was written following my participation in the 2Actify Online course offered by the iJOBS program from July 17 to September 15, 2017 We have all been there: you’re attending iJOBS and (Alliance for Career Advancement) ACA events to learn about potential career options, you’re updating your resume and curriculum vitae to be ready for that first application, but then you suddenly hit a brick wall when you realize your LinkedIn profile hasn’t been updated since college (ack!!).

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.

This post was written following the September 28, 2017 iJOBS event with Regeneron Regeneron prides itself for being a company thriving on quality research and the active role it plays in the entire life cycle of its drugs. The company was found by two M.D Ph.Ds (Leonard S. Schleifer and George D. Yancopoulos) with the goal of creating regenerative medicine for neuroscience research. The company, which initially received $1 million in venture capital funding, now has over 5,500 employees and 6 FDA-approved drugs, which were all invented in-house, from start to finish.

This post was written after the September 27, 2017 iJOBS event: Applying for jobs as an international student, advice from an immigration attorney held at Rutgers University On September 27^th, immigration lawyer Michael J. Goldstein gave a talk on the process of going from a student with F1 status to finding a job with an H1-B petition and further. During a time of turmoil regarding immigration laws, Goldstein stressed how important it is to find a lawyer focused primarily on immigration law.