How I Balanced a Rewarding Biotech Internship and My Senior Year of College
When I first started working at Roivant as a Development intern at the beginning of my last semester of college, I had no idea what to expect. I was told I’d be helping “cross-functionally” wherever people needed me. Between taking full-time classes, handling all my extracurricular activities, and trying to make the most out of my last semester at Duke University, I was worried I’d be overwhelmed by work or that I’d be given only small projects that would be of little value to the company. Fortunately, neither of these things happened, and I’ve learned so much from my few months here. My project leaders were flexible enough to accommodate my schedule as well as thoughtful enough to carefully pick my projects so that I’d get the most out of the 10-20 hours I could come into the office every week.
In particular, I’ve really appreciated how closely my boss, the Development Chief of Staff, worked with me to expose me to as many interesting projects/departments/people as possible while also making sure I was keeping up with school. From the beginning, he made it a point that I was ultimately here to learn, and he wanted me to finish out my Duke career strong. As a result, I always felt that I could go to him with any worries as well as any ideas for new types of projects I might be interested in. For example, when I told him that I might want to be in Digital Innovation as a potential future rotation, he set me up with a Digital Innovator, to work on a next-generation initiative developing a searchable database that would allow Roivant drug developers to derive scientific and business insights from all Non-Clinical/Clinical Pharmacology studies. At the same time, he set the limit for working remotely to 2 hours per week because he didn’t want me “working through the middle of the night” and actually cared that I’d get enough sleep!
Despite my part-time status, I truly feel that I got to work on projects that have a tangible impact on advancing Roivant’s pipeline. In addition to my Digital Innovation project, I worked under the SVP of Clinical Pharmacology to conduct literature reviews studying vehicle effects and particle size effects for one of Roivant’s new drugs. I felt that I was answering key problems affecting drug formulation and trial design (changing drug particle size, for example, can be a process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars!) and was truly helping the team after presenting at their development meeting.
Ultimately, Roivant’s culture and its people gave me the autonomy and flexibility to successfully manage my many obligations as a college senior, while providing incredible perspective on the company. I’m happy to say that I’m now going into Roivant’s Analyst Program fully confident about my rotational preferences and extremely excited for what the future holds.
Learn More About Roivant
Roivant Sciences is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on reducing the time and cost of drug development to improve the lives of patients and their families.
