When my struggle with the working authorization (CPT) went into the forth week still with no sign of getting it, I started to wear the please-kill-me-real-quick look. Our administrator told me that I was the second in our whole department’s history to do an internship, and the first guy was a US citizen so he didn’t need to worry about this. I was amazed how few of us – PhD students in Cell & Molecular Biology in the University of Chicago – are connected to the industry. During the journey, I asked my husband, who is an MBA and also a foreigner, and a friend in the PhD program in Stat department, how they got their CPT for the summer intern. They have a specific course to support it. In Cell & Molecular Biology, such infrastructure doesn’t exist! Thankfully, our administrator made all her effort possible and helped me out.

I applied the internship in Medical Writing at Takeda last year. Among a hundred applicants, 4 were invited to the interview and only 1 was recruited as the summer intern. I was lucky enough to be that one. However I had personal reasons that restrained me from going. So the deal was to apply again this year.

On January 6th 2011, I gave a talk as the interview for a Scientist job in a R&D institute in Beijing and was about to take the train to Shanghai. I got the email from Takeda asking me to submit a newer resume again. We had only 30 minutes before leaving for the train. So I quickly went through my resume, and updated with my recent activities at UC Biotech Association and my recent column article on Obama Healthcare Reform in a famous Chinese journal. The UCBA event I organized in fall 2010 was quite a success. We collaborated with our counterpart in Northwestern University and invited Dr. Brianna Blaser from AAAS Careers. The talk focused on alternative careers for PhD students, and attracted 120 BSD students and postdocs. The column article was on the history of US healthcare system and a comparison with the Chinese.

In February, I was invited to the interview again. Meeting the same interviewers for the same position was weird but fun. The interview soon developed into personal chats, on my research on the cell biology of the neuron, on my trip to China. We even chatted about the Tiger Mom. A few weeks later, I got the phone call from HR; I was recruited again.

My PI is a nice professor. When I firmly tole him that I wanted to do this, he immediately said yes. Then I spent almost 6 weeks working with the Office of International Affairs to get the CPT. Takeda is located in Deerfield, IL. My husband and I decided to move to near the Metra Station to make my commute easier. So there I was, spending 12 weeks working in Deerfield.

In regulatory medical writing, our main job is to write for clinical trials. The documents we write are enlarged version of experiment protocols, interim reports for committee meetings and final reports. The difference is that now, we are talking about 100+ page documents. A lot of efforts are put on ethics, justification for the proposed protocol and safety evaluations for the candidate drug. What surprised me was how frequently I reached out to people in other departments. I consulted people in Clinical Operations and Regulatory Affairs for the actual conduct of the trial, Statistics for the safety data, Pharmacovigilance for safety evaluations, Clinical Science for pharmacokinetics data and evaluation, and Nonclinical for preclinical experiments for dosage determination. So often you would see me writing emails or on the phone. When I finished the first draft, I arranged meetings with the whole team for their comments and inputs.

The job was not boring at all. It is a perfect mixture of working alone and interacting with colleagues. People at Takeda are knowledgeable, responsible and funny.

During my 3 month internship, I worked on 3 projects, and was exposed to a full spectrum of documents for medical writers! I truly enjoyed this type of work and am very grateful that I seem to find something I love to work on. My worry since I decided I don’t like academic jobs is fading away.

Now I am back on campus, working toward a defense soon. I am planning to go back to the medical writing field after graduation.