Alumni Spotlight - April 2023

How long were you a member of miLEAD? What positions did you hold?

I was a miLEAD member for 2 years. I started as a consultant, progressed to a project manager, and then joined the board as the Director of Public Relations.

What was the most interesting project you were involved with while part of miLEAD?

It's hard to choose just one because I had the opportunity to contribute to very diverse projects in several different industries. To name a few, my first project focused on developing a micro-needle for long term vaccine delivery; another built a case around the economic benefit for insurance providers to partner with our at home physical therapy client; and a third was developing a market entry plan for a simulation software company. Each project was unique and challenging in its own way, but the most interesting part of every project for me was the overall process: understanding the broader client question, breaking it down into individual work streams, and watching the analysis turn into actionable recommendations.

How did miLEAD help you obtain your current position?

I realized that I was not passionate enough about bench research to make it my long term career, but was really interested in the intersection of business and science. I knew I needed to build some practical expertise in this space and so I joined miLEAD. miLead enabled me to translate skills learned during my PhD such as critical thinking and extracting insights from data to a business context. Having demonstrated experience through miLEAD of how I was able to apply these skills outside the lab was crucial to successfully obtaining my current role. I drew on many examples from miLEAD during my interviews, everything from interpersonal team dynamics to dealing with ambiguity to more tactical project management. No doubt that miLEAD helped me stand out.

What is your day-to-day life like in your current position?

What I love about my team is that it’s very dynamic and we get to work on diverse projects all the time so the day-to-day can vary widely. I regularly collaborate with cross-organization stakeholders to prepare reports and presentations, summarizing portfolio status and progress. I also develop tools and dashboards to visualize our portfolio data. Depending on business needs, our team will lead portfolio initiatives such as R&D prioritization, risk analysis, competitive positioning, throughput, etc. These projects consist of analytics using internal and industry data sources, and creating slide decks to communicate key insights and strategic recommendations. This then rolls up to broader strategic plans for our R&D portfolio that align with overall corporate goals and objectives.

What did you learn through miLEAD that you apply to your current position?

Reflecting back, I can draw so many parallels from my experience in miLEAD to my current position. With miLEAD, I learned to structure complex client cases into frameworks, identify key questions, and develop strategic solutions. My team at Genentech is essentially an internal consulting group and we do very similar work to this. We regularly build narratives around data to influence decision-making and implement strategy with the goal of optimizing the success of our portfolio. We collaborate across the organization and engage senior leadership and stakeholders to pressure test our ideas—quite like client meetings with miLEAD!

What advice would you give to current or prospective miLEAD consultants?

Exploring career options seems overwhelming but was incredibly enlightening for me. I didn’t know all of the possible career paths for PhDs until I started doing informational interviews with folks across the pharmaceutical industry. Obviously we can do the research, but consider regulatory, medical affairs, BD, clinical science, PM, marketing, strategy, and the list goes on. If you know the lab isn’t for you, but aren’t sure of what you want to do, start by identifying what you do like about research (for me it was experimental design and problem solving), then start talking to people about their jobs and see what aligns with those interests. Narrow it down from there.

Additionally, for most roles within industry, you’ll have to demonstrate collaboration, leadership, dealing with adversity, etc. You have many of these skills from graduate school already, but I highly recommend to start building up relevant extracurricular experiences to show interest and initiative outside the lab.This will not only give you diverse experiences to discuss in your interviews, but will show the interviewer that you’ve already connected the dots on how your skill set applies broadly.

Finally, when I was getting my PhD at Michigan, you could take an extra class of your choosing each semester. I took several business classes, including strategic market planning, commercialization of biomedicines, entrepreneurship, comprehensive healthcare strategies. Take advantage of this if it still exists—it really helped me understand drug development from a business perspective.