Students
2009 Summer Internship with Merck & Co.
by Jennifer O'Neill
10 Weeks Later
Sometime around the beginning of May, the relief I had felt post-offer changed into nervousness. Suddenly, getting the internship seemed easy. Now I was going to have 10 weeks to really impress my employer, while trying to determine if it was a place I wanted to work full time. 10 weeks. It sounds long, but once you’re in it, it feels very very short!
This summer, I interned at Merck & Co. on a vaccine brand. My project involved examining a certain type of consumer behavior that had been observed, and determining whether there were any marketing actions that could change that behavior. (I know that sounds really vague, but there’s only so much I can say about it on the internet). The project was a great learning experience for me, because it touched a lot of different areas of the brand, so I got to work with a lot of people on the brand team and in market research. The issue I was looking at is also something that effects a lot of healthcare brands, so I also got to do external research and talk to people across the company about my project.
The first week was pretty slow. I basically read up on the product and the diseases it prevents. Rather boring, but important stuff to know. Things started picking up in the second week, as my manager had set me up with several “orientation” meetings with everyone on the brand, including the US and Global Brand Leaders. That week I also started collecting external research reports. It was fun to search for them on the internet, almost like treasure hunting, but it was not so fun to have to read them. Academic research does not read like my favorite chic lit books. But still, I managed to glean some pretty good info from it.
Around Week 3 I felt like I was starting to understand the issue broadly, but didn’t feel any closer to solving it for my brand. Eventually, I decided I needed to do some primary research to find out what consumers were thinking about the brand, and hopefully discover why they behaved in certain ways. With the help of the market research team and their vendors, I designed a focus group study. I’d had no experience with market research at all, but since I’d done so much pre-research, I knew what I wanted to find out.
Watching the focus groups was probably my favorite part of the whole summer. I watched on the internet, because they took place in a different city. A moderator led the groups through all the questions I wanted to ask, but she also let them talk a lot. I was amazed at how much I learned. Even before I received a final report from the market research team, I knew what I was going to recommend to my team. Awesome feeling!
Another fun part was going out on field visits. In the pharmaceutical industry, the majority of marketing is done to physicians’ offices via the sales force that visits them “in the field”. Some offices don’t allow sales reps to visit because they don’t like the interruptions throughout the day. But from my experience spending a few days with some reps, most physicians, nurses, and office managers appreciate their reps as long as they provide valuable information and answer their questions. I gained a lot of insight about my project from these visits as well, because I found that physicians and nurses actually have a lot of influence on how their patients behave with respect to their treatments.
The summer seemed to fly by, and before I knew it, Week 8 was upon me. I felt like I’d just figured it all out, and I only had a week to prepare my final presentation to the brand team. I had learned so much that I struggled to keep my deck to a reasonable length. Despite getting it down to about 30 slides from 50, I still ended up leading a 1.5 hour discussion on a Friday morning. That’s a good thing though, because it meant the team was very interested in what I had to say! In the final week, I presented a much shorter executive summary to the leadership of the internship program, all the other interns, several MBA alums, and one high level executive sponsor who happened to be very interested in my topic and asked me a lot of tough questions. It was nerve-wracking, but I knew my stuff!
All in all, the internship was a success. I learned a lot, performed well, and got to know a great company. I even got to bring home some fun branded goodies - though no products, I can’t exactly give out vaccine doses to my friends!