Friday, June 26, 2015

Summer Internship Series: Mike, James and Anuj

This week we have the privilege of hearing from Mike Koskulics, James Ma and Anuj Jain. Read on to hear about their internship experiences so far.

Mike studies Pharmaceutical Management and Marketing and is working in Whippany, NJ...

"This summer I’m interning at Bayer Healthcare in Whippany, NJ where I’m working on the Essure 2016 brand plan. Essure is a non-surgical, permanent birth control device that Bayer purchased for over $1 billion a couple of years ago from a company called Conceptus. 
So far, my experience at Bayer has been great. Working on the brand plan, I’ve gotten the chance to dive into every facet of pharmaceutical marketing—from advertising to sales training to pricing. While I’ve learned a lot, my favorite part of the experience has been seeing how marketing in the pharmaceutical industry actually works. Often times, the media portrays pharmaceutical companies as cold, money-hungry corporations that care more about the bottom line than the patients. My experience couldn’t be more different than this. On a daily basis, I witness far more discussions about the patient experience and physician support than profits. While getting hands-on experience in my chosen field has been amazing, the best part of my internship has been getting to be a part of an organization filled with people that truly care about helping people and doing the right thing. 
At this point in my internship, I have one month left before my presentation to the Executive Committee, a group composed of the heads of each business unit along with the CEO. I know these few weeks will continue to get more intense, as I race to learn everything I can and package it all together into what I hope will be a great presentation. Fortunately, I won’t be working non-stop the entire time. This coming weekend, my fellow Bayer interns and I are going to have a fun, work-free weekend in Atlantic City!"

James is a Finance and Pharmaceutical Management student spending his summer in Somerville, NJ...
"This summer I am lucky enough to be working in Somerville, NJ at Ethicon, part of the Johnson & Johnson family of companies and one of the world’s largest medical device manufacturers. Ethicon specializes in surgical care, and the Somerville site focuses specifically on R&D and manufacturing of wound closure and hemostasis products.
 
As an MBA intern in finance, one of several Leadership Development Programs at J&J, I support Ethicon’s Global Strategic Marketing department. My main project has been developing a process to evaluate and decompose the performance of our financial forecasting for new product launches, in order to gain insights for and improve future models. Because of the nature of medical device new-product development, capital investment and allocation decisions must be made years before the product reaches the market, so the accuracy of these early-stage financial models is critically important.
 
The program has been excellent at providing training and connecting me to others across the J&J organization, which is vast, but decentralized enough to stay nimble in a given sector. My greatest challenges have been learning the various acronyms and tracking down the right person to ask sometimes-stupid questions. As an NJ native, I am also eternally grateful for my 10-minute commute from within the suburbs, and the relative density of J&J offices in the area has made it easier to connect to MBA interns in other programs."

Anuj is concentrating in Supply Chain Management and Strategy & Leadership...

"Hello everyone, I’m Anuj Jain, specializing in Supply Chain Management, and interning at Ferrero. Yes, I make sure that Tic Tacs, Ferrero Chocolates and Nutella spreads are available when you go shopping.

I am working in the supply chain department as a Supply Chain Advisor/Analyst. It has been a great journey so far. The supply chain of Ferrero is very complex as the products have a very short shelf life. The products are imported from other countries, as we do not produce in US. The biggest challenge is that the business is customer driven, which is a nightmare for a Supply Chain. The forecasts are never accurate. So, even with a short involvement of 3 weeks, I have seen numerous challenges faced by my department. Since beginning my internship, I have been working on analytics based on historical data available to us, and preparing tools that can help the Supply Chain team to become more effective and accurate in their forecasting. Yesterday, I participated in a daylong consensus meeting with the Marketing, Forecasting and Sales teams. In this meeting all the departments decide on one final target number for the upcoming months and it was a great learning experience for me. The greatest one, by any means, so far. The agreements and disagreements between the departments, the challenges and questions posed at each other, and the agreement on a final number gave me an opportunity to understand the different perspectives of Sales, Marketing and Supply Chain. I was super tired, but I was really happy to have had such an opportunity. I was helping my manager with the intelligence based out of historical data using the tools that I had prepared. The most important lesson that I learned in this meeting is that communication is the most essential factor for an efficient Supply Chain.

I do not have any plans as such for the summer due to work commitments, as the next 3 months are super super super busy at Ferrero. 75% of our business of the year happens between September and December!

Okay, now I’ll leave everything aside and talk about the serious stuff. Yes, we can eat as many chocolates as we want. So, if you don’t recognize me in the fall when school re-opens, don’t blame me. I am the victim here."

That's all for this week! We will take a week hiatus as next week is 4th of July weekend!! But be sure to check back in 2 weeks to learn more about what the Class of 2016 is doing this summer.

No comments:

Post a Comment