Guest Post: From a Successful Internship Applicant
[This guest post is from AuthorAID community member Sumesh Khanal, who is primarily a medical intern at the Institute of Medicine, Nepal. Thank you, Sumesh! —Barbara]
I am doing a 2-month global health internship with Costello Medical Consulting (CMC), Cambridge, UK. I read the advert for the internship in the AuthorAID Upcoming Events newsfeed.
CMC provides the pharmaceutical industry with consultancy services regarding market access and medical communications. As part of their public service, they created an internship for an early-career health professional from a low- or middle-income country. The intern was to learn skills in evidence-based medicine, medical communications, and health economics by working with CMC staff on a health problem from the intern’s community.
Reading their notice, I wondered “What does this company actually do?” and “What are they looking for?” After all, market access and medical communications services to the pharmaceutical industry hardly exist in developing countries like Nepal.
Simply put, companies like CMC work with pharmaceutical companies to provide communications support. They’re involved in writing journal articles, making posters for congresses, writing submissions to seek national bodies’ approval of drugs or devices, performing systematic literature reviews, and building health economic models. That’s why their notice said possible projects for interns could be “producing a flyer to promote awareness of a specific disease, calculating the economic impact of a disease in a particular country, or conducting a systematic literature review on the effectiveness of a certain treatment”.
Because it was hard to know what the company was seeking, the hardest part of applying was deciding on the project topic. After much deliberation and research, I chose the topic “systematic literature review of telemedicine programs in developing countries”.
The rest of the application process was pretty straightforward. It involved sending my CV, a cover letter, and a brief project description. After 3 weeks, I received an email message inviting me to be interviewed via Skype. During the interview, I was to give a 15-minute talk on the rationale for the project and the project’s implications for my community.
After 2 postponements because of power outages in Nepal, the interview finally took place. During it, the consultants from CMC asked about various aspects of the project.
About a week later, I was emailed that I had been chosen as the first-ever Global Health Intern at Costello Medical Consulting!
I started my internship on 4 October 2013, and it will continue until December 6. One good thing about this internship is that I’m also a visiting scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge. Thus, I can attend lectures in the Master’s in Bioscience Enterprise program. This program is for bioscience students interested in founding businesses based on bioscience research!
Currently, my project is in full swing. I have learned many things while working here, but I guess that has to be in another post.