MED Students Take Career Focus Beyond Medicine
Chris Sullivan (MED’08) organized a career day for his classmates in the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences.
Sometimes the best help in that elusive job hunt doesn’t come from Career Services, but from the people sitting next to you in class. Chris Sullivan (MED’08), along with a group of Graduate Medical Sciences Student Organization (GMSSO) members, helped his peers launch their job search by organizing a career day for students in the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences, a Boston University School of Medicine program that offers doctoral and master’s degrees in life sciences.
Sullivan, a student in the department of biochemistry and a former vice president of the GMSSO, helped start the group two years ago. “At that time, there had been the perception that we get ignored a lot because a lot of the focus is on the medical students,” he says. “Since then, we’ve focused on student issues.” While the group has hosted orientations, barbecues, and various socials, this was their first career fair. The April 27 event featured recruiters from top industry, academic, and government institutions, as well as various workshops and an alumni lunch.
Companies recruiting at the event included Merck, Millennium, and Cell Signaling Technologies, and among the alumni joining students for the day were patent attorneys, scientific editors, medical liaisons, and marketing specialists.
Next year, Sullivan says, the group hopes to extend the event to the Charles River Campus. But for now, he’s happy that a group of students could successfully put together such a large networking event. “We’re students,” he says. “We’ve had to manage to swing our pipets and our experiments around at the same time as planning this.”
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.