Friday, March 17, 2017: Starting your industrial career

Two recent graduates from the chemistry department, Alina Borovika (2015 – Nagorny Group) and Naoko Ichiishi (2016 – Sanford Group), came to Ann Arbor to share their experience starting an industrial career as a fresh PhD graduate. Alina started her presentation by introducing the work culture at Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the division within the company which she belongs to. She highly recommended a career in process chemistry, citing everyday opportunity to learn new things and to practice chemistry skills and knowledge in problem solving.

Naoko is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Merck. She introduced the post-doc program at Merck, and compared it to academic post-doc. She highlighted the ample resources and supports that are available to post-doc at Merck, which enable them to freely pursue their research ideas. During her talk, Naoko also presented the statistics of different career opportunity that people pursued after they “graduated” from the Merck post-doc program.

Following the seminar, Alina and Naoko were joined by a group of graduate students, and had an open discussion about the job-hunting process after PhD.