Center for Careers & Internships

There are more than 181,200 ongoing clinical studies throughout the United States and around the globe. However, since the Food and Drug Administration came into being in 1938 just 1,453 drugs have been approved through the end of 2013, according to the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society. In other words, the success rate of experimental drugs making it to pharmacy shelves or your medicine cabinet is pretty low. Jack will explain the drug development process stages and focus on his work at Genentech in the discovery stage.

Andre will overview commercial roles like marketing and sales, and possible career paths in the BioPharma industry. She will share examples of some key projects which demonstrate the types of responsibilities and opportunities in the commercial functions in BioPharma companie.

Tanvir will provide an overview of the medical device segment within the Life Science industry (what are medical devices, size of the industry, emerging trends, and example medical device companies). She will then talk about the role of the Quality Engineer and related roles within a typical medical device company. This session is excellent for those majoring in life science disciplines to understand another possible roles for career exploration.

Aaron Smith ‘09 (Film & Media Culture), Principal Industry Analyst @ Google will discuss how to communicate analytics in ways that balance simplicity with thoroughness. He will focus on the art of designing data-driven presentations for executive-level audiences. At Google, Aaron specializes in marketing strategy within Financial Services, gathering data, uncovering insights, and translating insights into business recommendations. Students will walk away with a toolkit for structuring thought whenever they need to pitch an idea using data.

Peter Lubans ‘06 (Mathematics, Computer Science), leads the Research and Development (R&D) effort at Qsemble Capital Management and will talk about quantitative trading, a notoriously secretive industry. Populated by PhDs from fields as diverse as speech recognition and astro-physics, it’s hard to imagine what quant hedge funds actually do on a daily basis. News stories are vague or full of speculation.

Jay Yonamine ‘07 (Political Science), Head of Data Science Ops, and Quality, Global Patents with Google will talk about what a data scientist does, skills that are important to the role, and how advanced degrees play into this career path. He will also speak about the role of Data Ethics in this space.

When it comes to data analytics, it is everywhere and used in a variety of industries and career roles. The panelists will talk about this growing variety, its appropriateness for many different majors, and how the liberal arts support careers in this space. Hear from a panel of Middlebury alumni with a variety of backgrounds who now have careers across a wide spectrum utilizing data analytics.

 

Moderated by: Alex Lyford, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Middlebury

 

A Conversation With:

 

Kelsey E. Hoekstra ‘17 (Mathematics), a Data Analyst with Vanguard speaks about how to communicate data to non-analytic practitioners. Building cool analytics is only part of the work. If no one understands the data or why it matters, it will not be used. Kelsey will be sharing best practices for visualizing and sharing data with business partners and colleagues.

Daisy Zhuo ’12 (Mathematics), Co-Founding Partner at Interpretable AI will discuss the importance of interpretability and fairness of machine learning methods in real-world settings. The discussion will compare classical machine learning methods including regression, decision trees, ensemble models, and deep learning as well as explainability tools such as Lime and SHAP. Daisy will also introduce some cutting-edge research such as Optimal Decision Trees pioneered by her co-founders at MIT that bridges the gap between interpretability and performance.

Stefan Claypool ‘09 (Chinese, Economics), Senior Product Manager at PayPal, will provide an overview of the crucial role of a product manager with a specific focus on how data can drive decisions with real product and business impact. Of all major tech industry disciplines, product management is in many ways the best fit for liberal arts students, because it demands a truly multidisciplinary approach to problem solving. In this session, he will discuss his past work as a market intelligence analyst, leveraging data insight and analysis to build strategic cases as part of a marketing org.