Last week, Nature published an excellent article by three Norwegian graduate students on their experiences doing summer internships in industry, while studying in the life sciences at Norwegian graduate schools. Graduate students in any STEM discipline should heed their advice. I myself did two summer internships in industry while in graduate school. They helped me try out different kinds of work and understand my strengths, weaknesses, and interests better. They also allowed me to try out living in different parts of the country.
A few points made by each of the students resonated with me. The second student, Kathleen, noted her surprise when the marketing team asked her how a new medical device would sell, and who the target was. "I became aware that, for a product to hit the market properly, the product maker must understand the end user and their needs. A solution on paper might not always be a marketable one." This is something I actually learned vividly while engaged in a lengthy conversation with a French post-doc I met in San Diego at a fluid dynamics conference. He was working with a start-up company developing a new immunoassay. Its engineering was innovative, but the product's value proposition for potential customers was unclear. What do I gain by adopting the new technology over what I am doing now? The existing technique was cheap, relatively fast, easy, and familiar to technicians. The new product would improve the quality of measurement, but this improvement might be too marginal given the cost to adopt the new method and retrain the workforce.
The third student, Nancy, described one of her lessons as "Quality Management is king" and I fully endorse this perspective as well. She emphasizes the commercial and regulatory benefits, but I would argue further that there are scientific ones as well. Quality Management is an attitude that more academic labs should adopt, because it contributes very directly to doing (and documenting) reproducible research.
The first student, Erik, listed one lesson as "Done is the new Perfect." It is a lesson well earned and worthy. Ironically, during my first internship, I learned an opposite lesson that I will have to tell on another occasion. Suffice it to say that sometimes, a product must be absolutely bulletproof when it is ready to ship, especially when it has life-or-death consequences.
I learned other lessons as well. One was, there is no such thing as a Physics problem, Math problem, or Computer Science problem. The problems arrive unclassified, and you need to figure out, learn, and deploy whatever relevant knowledge is needed to solve it.
The two companies I worked for were a contrast. The first one was a small company, and while they owned licenses to software such as Matlab and others, they were not always installed on all the computers in the office, in order to save memory. Small companies often exist at the edge of survival; there is no largesse. The second company I worked for was a Fortune 500 company, that provided subsidized housing and a shuttle van (occasionally a stretch limo when the van wasn't available) to take us interns to and from work. On one evening they took us on a dinner cruise. The intern manager had $4 million to spend on us interns (most were undergrads, but I was part of the graduate student cohort) including pay...a situation which did not last in later years.
On the other hand, at a small company, all I had to do to get a decision made was to walk into the boss' office (when he was in town). At the large company, often I had to fill out forms and collect multiple signatures.
I did end up working for the second company full-time, for about 7 years after I graduated. But both internships gave me something concrete to talk about at job interviews when I was leaving school....not just academic research that might be of limited interest to employers. I considered both my internships to be formative experiences that influenced the kind of scientist I am today.
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