Hello. Sorry if my previous post was hard to understand. I'm not actually in a fellowship program. I work as an MSL for a pharma company. I really enjoy the aspect of Reg Affairs, though, and am applying to four or five programs (Rutgers being my top choice) this year for the 2011-2013 fellowship period. I knew nothing about reg affairs until being employed in the industry, so that's the reasoning for not completing a fellowship until now. I graduated pharmacy school back in 2008. So with that info, I was wondering why I might run into problems (if any) for getting into a reg affairs fellowship program (again, top choice being Rutgers). Thanks!
I will apply the reasoning my colleagues and I have used when deciding which candidates to bring to second/third interviews at the PPS and especially when choosing who to bring on-site. There are usually good 20-30 people interviewing for a position at the Midyear (some years some are more popular than others), and some 12-15 make through all the rounds there. Most companies do not bring more than five or at most six (if a couple are local) people per position on-site (it gets expensive! unlike residencies, pharma companies usually pay for the prospective fellows' flight and accomodation). Every year there is one or two exceptional candidates (as an interviewer, usually you know in about five or ten minutes at most whetehr you really like someone or not) but there is always the big cluster in the middle which will supply the remaining three or four people for the onsite interviews, so it comes down to small differences deciding who makes it and who doesn't.
The main idea of the fellowships is not necessarily to teach specific skills (that's what graduate school and/or certificate programs are there for), it is to give graduating pharmacy students an opportunity to enter pharmaceutical industry, build networks, and gain valuable experience along the way. In that order. What do the companies get out of it? Identify talent which should (ideally, even though it's not always the case today) be retained and further developed. So, if I have someone who is already employed by the industry, I would have the following concerns:
- If they are already in the industry, why can't they switch internally? Are they just not good enough that their company would want to retain/develop them? Then why would I?
- If switching is impossible because of hiring freeze or size of the company or whatever, why aren't they just trying to get a entry-level position in the field?
- They are already in the industry, they have opportunity to network and eventually get where they want - so giving them a fellowship means denying a fellowship to someone who has no other way to get in.
- Do they have unrealistic expectations? Do they think I am guaranteeing them a job after the fellowship is over?
So, to overcome these concerns you would need to:
- Be such a stellar candidate that I just WANT to have you, these concerns unimportant by comparison
- OR have a good (and I mean GOOD) story to address the concerns I outlined above
It doesn't mean you won't get a fellowship, it just means you have an additional hurdle to overcome/additional explaining to do.
If you want to talk in more detail, feel free to PM me. I think I will copy this post to the Industry 101 thread if you don't mind.
