Placements! A tough phase....

While a student is studying his /her academic course it is sometimes a tough time to get along with the stress of placements. I would be narrating you what really happens when we are into the real innings of our academics or research in NIPER and the companies commence coming to hire and believe me, we are never prepared for so. What we know is that our assignments are not complete, we know is that our schedule is tight, what we know is that we know nothing regarding our field and realize that till now we have merely got a drop out of an ocean. This feeling is confidence shattering.

On the contrary, there may be some who may feel they would get a job because they belong to a very reputed institution like NIPER and companies are after the graduates from this institute. This has never been the case. There is an attached reward from the name of institute provided that you are willing to imbibe more knowledge and even more, you should be eager to take up a job.....

You would wonder who is not eager to take up a job. In my experience, this happens as the students studying in the research courses often feel some attraction for doing PhD initially which may rise to priority in their minds or fade away with each passing day while being here. The situation becomes perplexed for those who find it difficult to choose between the two.

A thing that keeps the utmost importance is that you need to have perseverance in your efforts. However, it may sound a bit idealistic but in real life too, this works. Secondly, you should not wait for your ideal job (especially based upon the compensation you deem yourself to be worth of). This would definitely create a hard phase for you later on because all in all at this stage we are freshers. Now coming to an imperative topic which says

"What kind of job profiles come to a PHARMACOINFORMATICS student"

Answering to this I would say many. There will never be a hard and clear demarcation between the profiles you would be offered and what your friends in other departments are offered (of course you cannot go to formulations or core lab work). Various profiles where you could excel may be pharmacovigilance, patent searching and analysis, data analytics, knowledge management, medical writing, competitive intelligence and secondary searching, regulatory affairs, modelling and bioinformatics scientist. The list is obviously not comprehensive so you can surely contribute your own views by pinging me.

Having known all this for each profile there are specific improvements that you need to make to your resume, technical skills, communication skills and even your personality traits (as assessed in interviews and group discussions). Since there are alot of sites discussing the ways for improving your communication skills and personality traits so the topics upon which I would elaborate technical skills and resume (but for this post only the technical skills).

A set of technical skill that is required for each of the above listed profile are -

Pharmacovigilance / drug safety associate- Along with carrying a perfect personality that reflects confidence in you, you should have the basic knowledge of pharmacological concepts like the classification of drugs for various indications, their side effects and interactions, certain knowledge of the clinical trials and the procedures.

Data analytics- For this there is strong requirement that you should be having the information of using MS Office and pharma knowledge (however this cannot be completely described as it is based on interviewer). Itis an additional advantage if you have hands on experience in using languages like python, R, VBA.

Bioinformatics scientist- This profile is more related to the type of project you are pursuing or have done because the requirement of companies may be different. Some may require you to have knowledge of modelling or dynamics software while others may want to hire a student who has done project in machine learning or involved in application of similar approach.

Regulatory affairs- What you need in this is strong knowledge of regulatory affairs for which you can enroll in free certificate course taken by Prof. Bansal. But completing the course does not suffice as the company will test you on their parameters while hiring you. So study hard if you go in this field.

Patents analysis and searching- This is a field where you may succeed if along with the knowledge of patents you are having additional knowledge of medicinal chemistry (which most companies prefer) or pharmacology or pharmaceutics.

The things which I have shared are from my personal experience but obviously there may be many other facets which I probably have missed out that needs to be talked about.The discussion is open for views from your side.