Career Week - Drug development from zero to hero

The EPSA Career Week (CW) aims at educating students about career possibilities that they are able to pursue after completing a pharmacy degree. Through a whole week, with an approach focused on the easiest accessible channel of communication - social media - we organize various career-focused workshops and release interesting publications, in order to familiarize our members with the procedures that they may face once applying for a job and give them guidance to present themselves in the best way possible.

This year, Career Week aimed to bring closer to the students the topic of Drug Development. Therefore, we took each stage of drug development one by one and had a closer look to the actual impact pharmacists can have working in different roles. Of course, showcasing such a big variety of fields required a very vast collaboration with our partners and alumni, who once again amazed us with their passion and dedication when it comes to playing an active role at students’ level and bringing knowledge and career guidance closer to students, through various channels such as articles, online activities, infographic content or interviews.

Drug Design is the first stage of Drug Development and plays a pivotal role in deciding, based on multiple digital software analyses, how a certain molecule may bind to different receptors, thus showcasing its potential in vitro and in vivo activity. Hence, our students had the chance to read, on Science Blog, an article which focuses on multiple aspects of in silico studies which a future healthcare professional may want to know in order to better understand today’s Drug Design technology and the role a pharmacist can have in the digital projection of potential high activity molecules.

For the second stage of Drug Development, we decided to emphasize on Drug Formulation. For this matter, we interviewed EPSA Alumnus, Clement Haek, who showed unlimited passion for his profession and for the process of educating students and agreed to share with us some insights of his career, which revolves heavily around Drug Formulation. The interview can be found on the EPSA Blog.

Clinical Trials indicated the third stage of Drug Development and were tackled in a more creative way. On Friday, we prepared a couple of interactive infographics which our students were invited to read in order to familiarize with clinical trials and assess their potential willingness to follow a career in this area.

For the Post Marketing Studies, the fourth stage of Drug Development, we decided to go big and release a new section on our Career Page, a platform whose goal is to provide students with valuable information about different career paths they can follow after graduation. Based on this, the Pharmacovigilance section was released, in order to familiarise the students with the core tasks and skills which a healthcare professional working in this field is recommended to have, alongside with many other valuable pieces of information.

The last day of Career Week was dedicated to the topic of Pharmaceuticals in the Environment, which was also the main focal point of the EPSA Annual Reception. Our goal for Sunday was to analyze the sustainability of today’s Drug Development Process and decide how environmentally friendly it is and what we can do to change that. For this particular occasion, we decided to collaborate with SUDDEN (Sustainable Drug Discovery and Development with End-of-Life Yield), a research project that aims at reducing the environmental hazards related to the life cycle of pharmaceuticals. A couple of questions on this matter were addressed to SUDDEN and the answers were published, under the form of an interview, on EPSA Blog.

On a different note, I believe the cherry on top of this whole week must have been the 2 complementary online activities organised on Tuesday and Thursday.

On Tuesday, we decided to deviate a little from the topic of Drug Development and take a closer look at the very broad field of Quality. Assurance, our students were able to attend a Chat with Professionals, where a very dedicated alumnus working as a Responsible Person Deputy had a very interesting and insightful talk about Quality Assurance in the Pharmaceutical Industry and showed positive spirit and desire to help our students by offering to stay for 2 hours to answer to all the questions.

On Thursday, we had the chance to listen to Madalina Gulerez, EPSA Alumnus, who is working as a consultant recruiter and who entertained the idea of guiding our students towards acquiring the proper skills needed to build a strong job application and manage to sell themselves to the maximum of their capabilities in front of their future employer.

All in all, we hope you managed to catch up with all our activities and this project successfully managed to provide you with some tools which will, in the end, help you increase your chances of getting access to a competitive pharmaceutical job market.