Mylan Internship
Raymond Jablonski, Class of 2016
A pharmacist, ruminating on his experience being stuck in multiple part-time jobs, said to me that it’s better to have a career than to have a job. He said “In a job, someone chooses what you do. In a career, you choose what you do” After experiencing all three of the biggest branches of pharmacy- community, hospital, and industry- it will be quite apparent to you that community and hospital pharmacy are jobs, and industry positions are careers.
Mylan is a generic manufacturer located in West Virginia (for the geographically challenged, it’s the state that’s the western border of Pennsylvania). If you’ve spent time in retail you have not missed their neon-light-blue bottle with its easy-to-open ribbed top. You might not have noticed they are also the manufacturers of Epi-pen, a product that the company loves to flaunt because of its contribution to at-home healthcare (and I suspect its billion dollar gross might be another reason, but don’t tell them I said that). At orientation all new employees learn the history of the company and what the company culture is. The history is interesting. It starts with two guys delivering meds to the rural northeast in their pickup and ends with outbidding Teva to acquire a multinational facilities. At the time the whole “company culture” thing seemed forced, like how Walmart makes its employees do the Walmart cheer in the morning meetings. Only later did I realize there was a culture at Mylan and all the employees were genuinely happy working there.
The application process began online. Having not even heard a response from in-state big pharma companies like GSK or Merck the summer prior, I decided my best bet was to expand my search to something pharmacy students wouldn’t think of- like generic companies. Initially they screened me in a phone interview by a HR employee (who I never met even though I tried to find him) and then from my future boss, the head of the department. The HR screening was just them asking about me, why I wanted to work for Mylan, the usual. My responses were no different from what they normally were: first the story of my high school science teacher who compounded Claritin and convinced me to get into pharmacy after going above-and-beyond in his class, then how I was reluctant at first but came to love pharmacy in college and wanted to work for Mylan after seeing how popular they were in retail. The most important factor here though was not the content of the answers, it was the enthusiasm in which they were delivered. You learn quickly by having a lot of interviews that if you don’t show interest, no one will remember you when they see their resume on their desk the next day.
The formal interview with my boss actually started with similar questions- which I contribute enormously to my success in that interview. I was able to start off enthusiastic and on the positive side. In fact, the passionate attitude conveyed by my story probably saved my butt because I nearly bombed the technical questions that followed. The clearest memory was being asked what the difference was between wet and dry granulation. That taught in one of the first compounding lab lectures; how was I supposed to remember!? I just said “Well I know they are different ways to make solid dosing forms. We learned a lot about solid dosing forms, especially the pharmacokinetics such as different orders of elimination and multi compartment…” followed by me ranting about whatever I could think of that was fresh in my memory, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I never in fact stated the difference between wet and dry granulation. Well unfortunately he did notice but since we already started on the right foot it wasn’t troubling. His response was essentially that if I didn’t know the technical details it was OK because the purpose of the internship is to learn. His response solidifies my theory that it’s all about how much passion and enthusiasm you have for industry that’s going to land you the internship.
My position was in Operations Excellence, as a Manufacturing and Technical Services (MTS) intern. The meaning of this title, including what the job entails, were initially unclear. Once work started, everything became clear. Operations Excellence is a department that ensures pharmaceutical quality is up to current Good Manufacturing Standards, as defined by the FDA. This includes Quality Control which identifies when deviance occurs in a batch, such as capping (tablet breaking) or volatile dissolution rates, and MTS which identifies the cause of the deviance and recommends changes in the process to prevent future incidents. You were basically playing a scientific detective trying to find out what caused the deviation. This involved pouring over equipment data and looking for abnormalities, identifying the culprit to Quality Assurance which would approve or deny your investigation. Some of the investigations were easy- a bug fell off someone’s shirt into a barrel of capsules and were were asked by QC whether the whole thing should be scrapped or not (it was scrapped at an estimated loss of $150k). Others required a lot of scientific knowledge and ingenuity. The last investigation I did before I left was only solved because I noticed the temperature at the end of one stage of a process was lower than the temperature starting starting the next stage, which didn’t make sense because it should have cooled between steps, not warmed. These were 2 temperatures out of hundreds of variables that you needed to recognize in a production record that was 100 pages long.
The work was very interesting, but what was even more exciting was seeing how vastly different industry is from the rest of pharmacy. First off, the hours vary highly because you are not paid hourly. Some days you may stay later to finish your work some other days (re: every Friday) you might leave early. The actual specifics of how this worked I never quite understood. You aren’t punching in and out, so technically you could just sneak out and go home, as I caught some employees doing a few times. But in general, the employees worked 40 hours total and as long as any work you needed to complete was finished, you were good. This is great if you’re like me and have a tendency to sleep in late.
Another drastically different change between industry and the rest of pharmacy was how work was assigned. At hospital, the pharmacists are assigned to order verification, compounding, dispensing, etc… and that’s what you do for the whole day. In retail you stand in one spot and verify orders, oversee technicians, call doctors, answer questions. It’s all very mundane, formulaic work. In industry, the work you do is much less routine. You are assigned to work on some projects, and you have to collaborate with those already on the project to figure out what role you will perform for that project. Really, it’s a better system than anything I’ve ever experienced because you can adopt the work you do to your personal strengths and contribute in areas that you enjoy.
Additionally the amount of work you are assigned is actually small. A senior employee explained he got ahead because he recognized that in school you are told what to do or what to study, but once you get into industry you need to be proactive rather than reactive. If you’re an underachiever you can away with just doing what you’re assigned; just expect to never advance in salary and be the first to go if layoffs come. Realistically, this means that in addition to the projects you are assigned, you need to go out and find projects that interest you. Or if you really want to get ahead, make your own project. I noticed that monitoring lab trends was not automated, so I started a project where I wrote a program to pull the data off the servers so it could be graphed and trends analyzed. This involved contacting the programmers who maintained the lab database and asking quality control what lab values would be important to trend. I choose this project because it fit my hobby/skill: programming, it was something that would help the company, and something that could prove my ambition and passion. Having the flexibility to do what you want, as long as what you are doing is contributing positively to the company, makes industry miles above retail or hospital.
Industry is pharmacy’s dirty little secret. You don’t get told what to do, there are plenty of opportunities for advancement, and you get to make your own career path. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, take a serious consideration into industry pharmacy. An industry internship is definitely something every pharmacy student needs to experience. You won’t be disappointed.