from bench to board

During my internship I had the opportunity to attend an all-employee meeting. The CEO spoke for about half an hour, then something unexpected happened. The Chief Scientific Officer stood up to explain something research related and I heard a familiar yet almost foreign language.

Barely anything scientific entered my ears in my one year of business school and during my time as a commercial MBA intern. This is the first time after business school that I truly felt my science background was actually an asset that I could leverage in the future.

During the MBA summer internship, you'll spend a lot of time in meetings. If you're an MBA student, you may be wondering why you have so many team projects at school. They are there to prepare you for your future function in the internship and after graduation. In my internship, I've had days where I had back-to-back meetings all day. That's a very common situation in Corporate America.

While we had a lot of meetings at during the first year of my MBA, I was still not mentally prepared for how frequent and how important meetings were for making decisions until my summer internship.

The best thing about leaving your job and doing the MBA is that it gives you two years to pause and reflect. As a bonus, the MBA summer internship is like leadership learning on steroids.

During the internship, students have a lot of time to engage with senior leaders through one-on-ones. You work on a team and do projects, thus acquiring learnings. Then you discuss these learnings during engagement with senior leadership, and reflect.

This cycle of learning and reflection in such a short amount time is incredibly powerful and hard to find outside of an MBA program.

Learning about leadership is like being a detective. You're given bits and pieces by different leaders - clues, if you will. And then it's up to you to interpret those clues and create a story of what leadership actually is. I had a conversation with a senior executive and he told me one of the trademarks of a rising leader is when your bosses aren't in the room, they still trust that you will take the team further to achieve their vision.

This week, a reader had requested information on MBA roles in a pharma company. I thought it may be a good idea to write a blog post on this while the MBA summer internship is still fresh in my mind. I won't mention any companies in particular, and will keep this information as general as possible.

This post will only focus on the commercial function as that is the only area where I have first-hand experience. While I put down pharma in the post title, it also applies to medical device companies for the most part. Alright, let's get started.

Because Duke University is located in Durham, NC, many folks are concerned about recruiting across the US. For example, the major hubs for pharma, such as Boston, New Jersey, and the Bay Area are far away. Fortunately the Health Sector Management (HSM) program at Fuqua has a solid relationship with many health care companies. Because of the strong reputation (and size) of the HSM program, the Duke MBA is a key target school for many companies in the health sector.

2 years ago, I was in the shoes of a prospective student trying to figure out which schools to apply to. It's difficult knowing beforehand how well a school fits your personality and career aspirations, because, well, you haven't been a student there yet. Interacting with current students and experiencing the classroom is helpful but oftentimes less objective. Here is a look at my reasons for choosing Duke Fuqua, with a focus on objective evidence. You may find my framework of looking for clues to be helpful for other schools as well.

If your goal is to move up in an organization, it's important to gain exposure to senior leadership. And when I say exposure, I don't mean through a one-on-one or a couple of social events. I mean by working on an actual project together. These are projects that typically take extra time beyond your day job. They are called - quite simply - night jobs.

I had always been intrigued by people's transitions into leadership. In fact, that was my motivation when I started this blog. One of the first things I sought to find out during my internship was how leaders got to where they were. My finding is this. It's not the degree. It's not age or how smart they are. It's not the resume, or otherwise a checklist of experiences that appear to be necessary to move up. It's the person and their motivators. It's how they interpreted the world around them and how they were able to take the initiative to transform themselves.