Discussion
Still attempting to pivot out of academia and into a pharma consulting, real-world evidence, outcomes research, medical writing or data science role
It's not a crisis right now, but the job I'm in won't last forever, it turns out
I'm actually hoping to get a job with a big pharma company, so if anyone here lives in that world or can help me get in, would appreciate very much
:boost_requested:
Also, :NoAt: no need to reply if you're going to tell me about how bad big pharma is
@researchfairy have you heard of/tried Prime Global?
I was referred to them by a group leader at my old labs, got pretty far with it but got a charity job instead. Not sure how they are with remote tho, I was going to be based in Ldn https://primeglobalpeople.com/
@noodlemaz Checking my spreadsheet, I've applied there three times for jobs I saw on Linkedin (med comms and med writer jobs) but no luck hearing back yet
I'll add them to my daily check though, thanks for reminding me about them
@noodlemaz Btw, if you know anyone who works there and you could connect me, I'd love to say hi :)
@researchfairy hmm @jakobpunkt dost thou know of anyplace currently hiring..?
@researchfairy as an aside, I have a friend who works in a secure government role dealing with fraudulent pharma claims (ie stopping snake oil imports/sales/advertising). Pretty interesting. I suppose you know about that field of work but just in case.
Smart move getting out of academia, it f*ing sucks.
I've got enough applications and rejections that I can do a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis
Long-rank test p-value is 0.035, indicating that the curves are different overall
HR for rejection in applications to non-Medical Science Liaison (MSL) roles compared to MSL as baseline is 3.65 (95% CI 1.02 to 13.16, p=0.047), indicating faster rejection
@researchfairy Thank you for posting this - this will make my disclosure/disclosed nothing analysis much easier, I think.
If I stratify my job applications by company type ("Big Pharma" vs Other), there seems to be no difference in the rate at which I am rejected by these types of companies
Curiously, if you put all my applications together, the rejections all seem to happen either right away (just after 0 days) or right around the 1-month mark or the 2-month mark
Definitions:
- MSL: Field-based Medical Science Liaison roles focused on scientific exchange with healthcare professionals.
- RWE: Real-world evidence, HEOR, epidemiology, and safety surveillance research roles.
- Trials: Clinical research and CRO roles involved in study execution and trial coordination.
- Other: Roles that don't fit neatly elsewhere, including patient engagement, science communications, and medical education.
Job search milestone: sent out 50 applications as of today
(I started censoring applications at the 90-day mark, assuming that 90 days with no word is a quiet rejection)
55 applications sent out so far
65 applications sent out so far (the graph looks different now because I changed the graph's week bins to start on Monday. I had messed them up before and they were starting on Thursday or something.)
I have had 2 job interviews this week, and I'm feeling optimistic
The job application survival curves have progressed a bit
The MSL, Trials and Other curves look more or less the same
Medical Writer jobs is fresh, so there's no rejections yet
New is the RWE rejections, which seem to come a bit faster than the bulk of the rejections in the MSL curve
It's still the type of job that seems like the best fit for me
I just got rejected after the second round of interviews :/
Back to square one
Sent out a few more applications, up to 70 now
Playing the numbers game
@researchfairy I need to figure out how you're doing this. It seems useful but it's pretty far outside of anything I learned in P&S.
@drwho Doing what? (What's P&S?)
@researchfairy The analysis of your job hunting data. I have a rather large data set (about 271 jobs across seven months, last time I counted) and I was eventually going to do a blog post about it. But then I realized that I haven't had to do a data analysis like this since I finished my degree.
Probability and statistics classes.
@drwho Oohhhh
I can send you the R scripts I use and my own data set
It's a Kaplan-Meier survival curve analysis, which is common enough in say cancer clinical trials, but not used often in other contexts
Private message me your email address and I'll send them over if you want :)
75 applications sent out now
I applied for a data sci job a month ago
Got an interview for it a week later
The interview was ~ 5 min and 1 question long:
Interviewer: Oh, you're in Montréal. Can you move to Ottawa? No? Pity.
So we parted ways
The job showed up in my Linkedin alerts today because it was posted again under "Greater Montreal Metropolitan Area"
Same company, same job, word-for-word
(Deepsigh)
Got a job interview
But not with a human
It's with some video AI thing
I hate this timeline so much
Anyway, that makes a 15% first-interview rate for RWE jobs, and a 5% first-interview rate overall out of 81 applications sent so far
82 applications so far
Doing my best
88 applications sent
Playing the numbers game 🎲 🤞
Send help 🆘
Glaxo always sends a survey link after you apply for a job
"How was it like to apply?"
They're all multiple choice questions like "What made you want to apply?" with several options provided
There is no way to give them my actual feedback: that the application form requires me to choose my degree from a list of possible degrees that does not have mine, or a reasonable equivalent, or an "other" or the option of typing my own
95 applications sent out now
Still at it
Attempting to pivot out of academia and into a pharma consulting, real-world evidence, outcomes research, medical writing or data science role
I'm actually hoping to get a job with a big pharma company, so if anyone here lives in that world or can help me get in, would appreciate very much
No need to reply if you're going to tell me about how bad big pharma is
@researchfairy you're based in Canada I understand? What area is your current academic research in, and what's your background? I can offer to send anything I see your way, but I'm sorry to say that I don't come across many open positions. It's often a network who knows who game. You're clearly data driven that is often a good start in medical 😊 support your approach to look broad in medical industry area, advise to also look at small pharma, R&D/startup maybe medical device.
Now at 97
A couple people with industry jobs I talked to, said to expect to send 100-200 before getting a job so—
Three more and I'm done right?
@researchfairy how are you finding these applications? Search for most specific job in most specific area first and then broaden scope more and more and more?
i can only tell from the software dev world and there are many local businesses but finding high quality job offerings worth applying to is hard
@saxnot In addition to Linkedin, these are the places that I check every day:
@researchfairy uh wow! What a cool checklist + cool transparent list of yours.
might services like https://visualping.io/ be of use to you? I use VisualPing quite a lot to keep an eye on things I can't directly subscribe to
Landmark: 100 applications sent out as of today
Still trying to get an industry job, put about 6 months into it, did 4 job interviews
If you have any leads or if you're already in the world of pharma, or if you know someone who can help me out, please get in touch!
@researchfairy 4 interviews after 100 applications is brutal. whoaw.
My condolences
Up to 105 as of today
I have a list of "Careers" pages for different companies that I'm gunning for
I go through it before 0800 every morning
Sometimes Linkedin also emails me about a new job that I already found there
I score a point against Linkedin if I have already identified and applied to a job via the company's Careers page before Linkedin tells me about it
I'm tired, friends
Deciding to radically accept at face value the parts of rejection letters where they try to be nice
I *am* dear
I *am* among many very qualified applicants
My time and interest *are* valuable
I *do* accept updates to a pharma company's careers site into my heart
There isn't much to work with tbh
Wow guys
That's a lot of rejections today
Save some for later ha ha ha
I mean, I did massively ramp up the number of applications per week in the last few weeks, and the first 2 weeks is the steepest part of the KM curve so I guess this is to be expected
108 applications out now
And I'm starting to get a sense of what to look for
🤞 Here's hoping that I only need to do a few more tosses of the dice
(Also if any of you wants to connect me to someone in the pharma/CRO/consulting industry, please do!)
That little gap a few weeks ago in the bar chart
That's where I had gotten to the second round of interviews
They were at the point of discussing which days per week they're wfh and details of office culture
I really thought that was gonna be an offer
OH WELL
"Oh nice, Pfizer must have posted a new job on Linkedin"
I've applied to a new job on average once per 1.6 days since the end of January (4.2 applications per week)
It's good to get so many rolls at the dice so to speak
And it's orders of magnitude better than the academic job market
But it's also exhausting
@researchfairy Jesus christ how
If you're gonna post approximately the same job after you reject me, I'm gonna send in an application again buddy
You're saying you use AI's to screen my applications, so I'm just gonna keep tweaking my CV slightly each time until the keywords align and a human recognizes that I can do that job after all
@researchfairy to be honest I never did figure that out.
but I was never applying to a big company before. I had the luxury of telling myself "When they do decisions based on LLM I am glad they rejected themselves" because I never "pimped my CV for the LLM". But I guess when you apply to big corporations you want to exploit the machinations of big cororations e. g. provide LLM-generated summary of the job offer inside the CV.
LLMs seem to prefer other LLM generated text¹.
I mean, I don't mean to brag but uh
Check out my publication list
https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/curriculum-vitae/
I CAN HANDLE A "MEDICAL WRITER" GIG
Anyway, I'm up to 117 applications sent out
