I received a couple questions from prospective students that are very specific to the pharma industry. I’m interested in the health sector and I’m in the Health Sector Management (HSM) program, so I answered these questions as best as I can. I thought I would share this information since it may provide valuable insight for those of you who are interested in HSM:

For HSM students, do you feel that on-campus recruiting by the pharma companies is significant, or do mainly independent job searches lead to pharma jobs?

On-campus recruiting is pretty heavy all-around! For HSM students and others who are interested in the health sector, Eli Lilly, Merck, Novartis, etc. all recruit Fuqua students.

Another really cool thing is that these companies post additional job openings on our internal careers website, which you’ll gain access to as a student. Alumni, hiring managers, and HR recruiters post to this site, and the response rate is VERY good when we apply (much better than blindly applying through other job sites) since the position was purposely advertised to Fuqua students.

Of course, additional off-campus searches on your own can result in some great finds, especially when you search our alumni database, which you can use to find alumni in your industry, role, or company of choice.

As a student, you’ll receive some pointers about how to best reach out to alumni. Overall, our alumni respond well to emails and requests for informational interviews, which provide a great opportunity to learn more about them, their company, etc. It’s a great first step in networking and possibly connecting to a company to which you may not have had access otherwise.

Check out the Daytime HSM Brochure and the Daytime HSM Career Snapshot to learn more about on-campus recruiting and careers.

I come from a scientific background. Are there alumni connections in the pharmaceutical industry with similar backgrounds?

Yes. I did a quick search within the online Alumni Directory, and it was easy to find alumni who have a similar background.

As a student, you can search our database of alumni by industry and function. You can even search by “Fuqua Education,” which means that you can sort by specific programs like the Master of Management in Clinical Informatics program (which most certainly gives some good results), the HSM program, the Global Executive Program, etc.

There are a good deal of alumni with either a PhD or M.D., which isn’t surprising, as there are quite a few people with scientific/healthcare backgrounds in my class, including pharmacists, nurses, doctors, etc.

Students use the Alumni Directory with a lot of success to find connections in industries and companies of interest. It’s always amazing to do a search and see a list of awesome connections right at your fingertips.