Season 4: About Pharmaceutical Industry and Eli Lilly

(MBA, Eli Lilly) First of all, pharmaceutical industry is important to us because it creates new drugs to cure many kinds of diseases that damages people’s life quality. It is a great industry to work with if you are passionate on improving people’s life quality and prolong lives. Nowadays, this industry, especially for leading patent pharmaceutical companies are facing increasing competition from generic companies like Teva in Israel. In 2011, many blockbusters will go off patents and thus these big companies will face huge losses in their ever cash cows. This trend puts lots of pressures and urgency on patent pharmaceutical companies. Most of these companies’ response will be to emphases innovation and accelerate the pipeline to overcome the gap. Also you may read news on pharmaceutical companies’ restructuring to cope with this strategic move. Last, another thing you may be interested in is that pharmaceutical industry has very long cycle. From a molecule to a fully approved drug on the market, it normally takes around 12 years. If you really care about the fast outcome and fast innovation, pharmaceutical industry may be not the right one for you.

With respect to Lilly, it is a good company. People in the company are generally nice and willing to share their experiences and offer advice. The overall culture is all about excellence, respect for people and integrity. Today, Lilly is still in the progress of global restructuring and you may clearly feel how fast they want to develop new drugs to replace those old blockbusters that are going off patent in the next few years. Lilly, like many other big pharmaceutical companies, has two key focuses in the corporate, one is R&D, over $3 billion investment every year, and the other is sales and marketing. Other functions and administrations are revolving around these two centers. In addition, Lilly, like many other pharmaceutical companies, is starting to expand business in emerging markets such as China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and etc. because of the fast increasing need on effective drugs.

All in all, pharmaceutical industry will be a good fit if you feel yourself are fascinated with healthcare. Lilly will be a good fit if you are in the spirit of teamwork and humbleness as well as agility of learning.

Life is an incredible journey, and now it's another start at Ross.

(MBA, Eli Lilly) I am a rising MBA 2 student. Yes, a rising MBA 2 student now. Time really flies before we realize it. My wonderful journey starts at Ross School of Business.

After the hectic recruiting season from Dec 2009 to Jan 2010, I got the offer from Eli Lilly Corporate Finance and will start my summer in Indianapolis! This summer internship is definitely giving me brand new experience in a dynamic industry – pharmaceuticals. I worked in an energy company before coming to Ross and this internship will provide a valuable opportunity to me to work in another important sector related to people’s life and happiness. I am very glad that I grasped this opportunity and look forward to tasting the real flavor there.

At Lilly, I will work in Treasury, leading the credit management improvement project. It involves creating new training materials, process improvement, building up new templates and streamlining SAP relevant modules. This is somewhat linked to my past experience in corporate finance and I think I could get on hand very quickly. For this internship, my goal is to test my fit to this company and find whether I like people there and the future job I am going to undertake on full-time base. This is going to be very exciting as I can meet new and different people every day, know more in depth about the pharmaceutical industry and Lilly, and also have fun with other MBA interns who live in the same building!

As for the things I am ‘nervous’ about, it may be whether I can quickly mingle with the team I am going to work with. As an international student, there are still too many things such as culture, language, working style, unwritten rules and etc, to learn. How to make you likable in the team may be an important task for me. : ) Therefore, I decide to do homework to research the company and team before I arrive in Indianapolis as well as refer to the internship 101 slides shared by OCD.

Alright, I will keep updating my internship experience in Indy and see you in May!