PIPS Project - Costello Medical Consultants

Costello Medical Consultants


Sector: Consultancy


Autumn 2012

The purpose of this three-month internship was to experience the day-to-day activities of an Analyst through involvement in a range of current company projects. As my previous scientific background was limited to academic courses and research, my personal goals were to enhance my business awareness within the pharmaceutical sector and to develop skills needed for a client-facing job.

I was involved in number of different projects spanning a range of disease areas. These included:

  • Producing medical education slides based on published clinical trial data. These were intended for use by medical science liaisons of a large pharmaceutical company to communicate with potential customers, and also for their internal training purposes.
  • Working towards a drug resubmission to the Scottish Medical Consortium (SMC) for approval of the medicine for use in NHS Scotland [...]. This required becoming familiar with aspects of pharmacoeconomics including budget impact models.
  • Carrying out various stages of systematic review production, including sifting of large volumes of abstracts and extracting information from relevant literature.

These, together with a number of smaller projects, were very enjoyable as they provided project variety and allowed me to organise my own time to maximise efficiency by giving me the option of changing projects throughout the day. Importantly, I have been given a satisfying level of responsibility with project work, with every assignment reviewed internally only upon completion or upon request. The opportunity to work on non-client work such as research and report writing for the European pharmacoeconomics conference ISPOR also showed me the scope and creativeness of company research, and also importantly gave me an understanding of current topics within the pharmaceutical sector.

This internship has made me much more confident in my organisational and time management abilities despite the adjustment from working on one very specific area to a number of diverse diseases. It has been very interesting to witness and learn more about client relationships and the constant communication that is central to ensuring delivery of high-quality results even within narrow time frames. Working on the projects has also made me more comfortable with Microsoft Office; I look forward to using the shortcuts I have learnt when I write my thesis. I am sure that the skills that this internship has given me will be useful not only during the remainder of the PhD, but also in my future career.

The range of activities carried out has made me much more aware of the various types of work that pharmaceutical companies require from companies such as Costello Medical, allowing me to make a better-informed decision about future job applications. I have been especially pleased with the level of responsibility I have been given in project work, and also the extent of client contact. I feel that these have made me more involved in the company and therefore motivated during this time. In terms of possible improvements I would have liked perhaps more choice in project involvements, although I appreciate that this was entirely limited by company activity during this time. Nevertheless, I have greatly enjoyed this experience and hope to find a job within this field in the near future.