What's your job about?
Sanofi helps improve the lives of people that live with disease or health issues. My areas of responsibility lie within the disease Multiple Sclerosis(MS). My work involves working within the Marketing Team on the therapeutic area called Multiple Sclerosis (MS) whereby Sanofi offer's treatments for patients that have mild or severe MS.
Tell us details about your daily work and your specific tasks.
My daily work involves multi-tasking at its finest! I usually start the week with WIP (work in progress) meetings to update everyone on how my projects are doing, where they’re at and also to clarify what priorities I have for the week. One meeting involves our hospital sales representatives’ team while the other is for our own MS franchise team which involves medical, sales, marketing, administration and anyone else who may be relevant like our pharmacovigilance, regulatory and legal teams. The rest of the week involves actually working on the projects! This may be a campaign, organising a stand at a conference, introducing new technologies such as a mobile app or website to help neurologists or patients with MS. These projects will often involve design or creative agencies who I work very closely with and develop great relationships with.
What's your background?
I was born in Coffs Harbour and grew up on the Central Coast, NSW
I was a nationalist for rhythmic gymnastics most of my life so that taught me a lot of discipline and commitment. It wasn’t until I was about seventeen that I decided I wanted to go to university and pursue a career in healthcare as gymnastics wasn’t a long-lasting career. This was a huge turning point as I had never valued education up until then. I realised how much I enjoyed and had a passion for learning. Getting into uni was a huge achievement for me. I also was lucky enough to take a trip with other uni students to Cambodia on a public health program.
How did you get to your current job position and for how long have you been doing it already?
I finished my degree in Health Science and Marketing with USYD in July 2018 and I started looking for graduate programs that included both healthcare and marketing as these were both my passions. This led me to the Sanofi Graduate program which offered 2 years and experience working across two different business units. I started this position in Jan 2019.
My advice is to give everything a go! Don’t hold back or think that you’re not capable because as much as University teaches you the basis for the underlying degree, there’s always going to be more that you won’t know until you start working in the industry. So be confident and give it your best shot. Also, if you don’t know what you want to do straight away for your career then that’s okay. Not many of us do, we just figure it out on the way and the only way to find out sometimes is to give it a try.
I knew I felt passionate about healthcare and exercise, so I started out in science/arts, then transferred to physiotherapy, then finally transferred to health science and marketing. I transferred within my first 6 months, luckily, I was able to get credit for my next degree and completed my degree within 3.5 years.
You don’t need to wait until you finish the degree to decide you don’t want to do something, but also don’t transfer within your first week without giving the units a proper try.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
No, I think having a background in Science, Healthcare and Marketing has helped me in this job, however, because the job's tasks have such variety, I think there are many backgrounds which you can come from e.g. business, marketing, finance, health care, public health, science. The most important traits to have are a good work ethic, time management, and people skills.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The part I love about my job the most is knowing that we make a positive impact on our patients' lives. I also enjoy working alongside great people who work really hard and enjoy each other’s company. Event management is a large part of my role which I didn’t realise I would love so much and also assisting in the design/content of our materials is really fun as it gives me the opportunity to use my creative side.
What are the limitations of your job?
In MS, we are a small team so we do need to prioritise our workload and utilise our resources effectively. We all work hard and some days we might need to stay back a bit later but we are motivated by the impact our work has on the community. It’s about teamwork and coming back to why it’s important for our patients and neurologists. We also have great flexible working options like working from home which helps.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...