Industry Internship over Summer?

[moralis]

Hi everyone, I recently received an offer from a major pharmaceutical company for a summer internship. Pay is pretty decent and likely doubles what I would get doing anything else, and allows me to explore career options outside of medicine/academia. However, the internship is more raw engineering/statistical analysis for process development, drug manufacturing, etc. instead of a typical premed research gig. I don't have anything else lined up for the summer right now except for my usual volunteering commitments on weekends and doing my main school year research part-time— especially considering the coronavirus situation with NIH SIP etc. being cancelled, should I just take the internship? Would it help much from a medical school application standpoint or should I just call it off and do more volunteering?

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[finn_]

I think if it's something you're interested in you should definitely go for it. I did 2 summer pharmaceutical internships and while I can't tell you whether they helped my application or not, I really enjoyed them and they gave me new experiences that opened my eyes to potential future career opportunities. I had the chance to network with some company executives (MDs) and hearing their perspectives on where medicine is going was really interesting.