Still attempting to pivot out of academia and into a pharma consulting, real-world evidence, outcomes research, medical writing or data science role

It's not a crisis right now, but the job I'm in won't last forever, it turns out

I'm actually hoping to get a job with a big pharma company, so if anyone here lives in that world or can help me get in, would appreciate very much

 

Also,  no need to reply if you're going to tell me about how bad big pharma is

#GetFediHired

I've got enough applications and rejections that I can do a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis

Long-rank test p-value is 0.035, indicating that the curves are different overall

HR for rejection in applications to non-Medical Science Liaison (MSL) roles compared to MSL as baseline is 3.65 (95% CI 1.02 to 13.16, p=0.047), indicating faster rejection

If I stratify my job applications by company type ("Big Pharma" vs Other), there seems to be no difference in the rate at which I am rejected by these types of companies
Curiously, if you put all my applications together, the rejections all seem to happen either right away (just after 0 days) or right around the 1-month mark or the 2-month mark

Definitions:

- MSL: Field-based Medical Science Liaison roles focused on scientific exchange with healthcare professionals.
- RWE: Real-world evidence, HEOR, epidemiology, and safety surveillance research roles.
- Trials: Clinical research and CRO roles involved in study execution and trial coordination.
- Other: Roles that don't fit neatly elsewhere, including patient engagement, science communications, and medical education.

Job search milestone: sent out 50 applications as of today

(I started censoring applications at the 90-day mark, assuming that 90 days with no word is a quiet rejection)

55 applications sent out so far

65 applications sent out so far (the graph looks different now because I changed the graph's week bins to start on Monday. I had messed them up before and they were starting on Thursday or something.)

I have had 2 job interviews this week, and I'm feeling optimistic

The job application survival curves have progressed a bit

The MSL, Trials and Other curves look more or less the same

Medical Writer jobs is fresh, so there's no rejections yet

New is the RWE rejections, which seem to come a bit faster than the bulk of the rejections in the MSL curve

It's still the type of job that seems like the best fit for me

I just got rejected after the second round of interviews :/

Back to square one

Sent out a few more applications, up to 70 now

Playing the numbers game

75 applications sent out now

I applied for a data sci job a month ago

Got an interview for it a week later

The interview was ~ 5 min and 1 question long:

Interviewer: Oh, you're in Montréal. Can you move to Ottawa? No? Pity.

So we parted ways

The job showed up in my Linkedin alerts today because it was posted again under "Greater Montreal Metropolitan Area"

Same company, same job, word-for-word

(Deepsigh)

Got a job interview

But not with a human

It's with some video AI thing

I hate this timeline so much

Anyway, that makes a 15% first-interview rate for RWE jobs, and a 5% first-interview rate overall out of 81 applications sent so far
@researchfairy fuck that shit so much, its going to generate some kind of transcript/summary, and this horseshit might as well be an email thread

@researchfairy Yep. I ran into a few of those in recent weeks. Including one "What do you mean you can't commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles?'

Which, I kinda get. I made the same mistake (albeit very briefly) when I first moved here.

@researchfairy for pete's sake
@gnomon I reported it to LinkedIn as "wrong location"
@researchfairy I should actually do an analysis of my job search records.
@researchfairy I need to figure out how you're doing this. It seems useful but it's pretty far outside of anything I learned in P&S.
@drwho Doing what? (What's P&S?)

@researchfairy The analysis of your job hunting data. I have a rather large data set (about 271 jobs across seven months, last time I counted) and I was eventually going to do a blog post about it. But then I realized that I haven't had to do a data analysis like this since I finished my degree.

Probability and statistics classes.

@drwho Oohhhh

I can send you the R scripts I use and my own data set

It's a Kaplan-Meier survival curve analysis, which is common enough in say cancer clinical trials, but not used often in other contexts

Private message me your email address and I'll send them over if you want :)

@researchfairy So sorry to hear about this disappointment.
@researchfairy cool analysis, and solidarity in your search 🫂
@researchfairy That actually seems to match the pattern I've seen with the applications I've been throwing around. A few will reject within hours but if I haven't heard back in a week it doesn't happen for several weeks.
@researchfairy congratulations on finding 30 (!) jobs that use your skills and training to apply to!

@bookandswordblog Oh there's lots of jobs out there, unfortunately it's still very competitive

I talked to a guy who works at a job similar to the kind I want, and he said he applied to ~200 jobs before he got the one he's at

Which is much better than looking for academic jobs

@researchfairy @bookandswordblog At least you have statistics to... er, keep you warm at night? I dunno. One does what one can with the data one generates.
@michaelc @bookandswordblog Yeah, it's not super useful stats, but here we are 🤷‍♂️