Appreciation and Gratitude
a Story About my Internship @Pfizer
In summer 2018, right amid my third year and my final year of college, I was so excited to be offered an internship at Pfizer in China. I was working at Strategy and Commercial Operations department. My job was creating a dashboard of Pfizer’s sales data.
Pfizer was really kind to me. The job was supposed to located at Beijing office. Because I was only interning for a month and I resided in Shanghai then, Pfizer agreed to let me work at Shanghai Office remotely. I was quite astonished when I walked into Pfizer's office at CITIC Square Shanghai. This is a skyscraper right beside the U.S. Consulate General Shanghai, where I applied my F-1 visa. The location was at the heart of this bustling mega-city. Every time when I look out of the window, I can have a sweeping view of the city-scape of concrete jungle. Back then, I was a college student at UC San Diego, living in small quiet town of La Jolla. This life in Shanghai was so different from my usual life in San Diego, giving me a (reverse) cultural shock.
My work was to visualize the sales data of Pfizer in China from 2017 to 2018 Q2. I created a dashboard on Excel and visualized the data according to different dimensions, including by provinces and cities, by months and quarters, by business units and business groups, etc. I also forecasted future sales using trend projection. The great thing about this word is that I really learned a lot about the real commercial analysis at a world-class company with huge amount of data.
On the other hand, the problem was that this was the first time for me to work under a very loose supervision, but I managed to overcome this difficulty. Because my manager was in Beijing and I was working remotely in Shanghai, I can only talk to him through phone calls. But sadly, the phones were always taken by the busy people there and I needed to aggressively snatch a phone to keep contact with my manager. Because my manager was very busy, sometimes he would not get back to me immediately when I submitted my work. I used my spare time to help my colleagues in Shanghai to translate Chinese into English. I also attended their meetings and learned a lot about the structure of this multi-national corporation. I really appreciated that my manager patiently taught me how to generate this dashboard, and my colleagues in Shanghai supported me for remote working.
I really appreciated the culture of the environment at Pfizer. My manager told me that the work time was from 9 AM to 6 PM. But every time I got there at 9 AM, I found that I was the first and only person arrived in this company. Actually, their work time is quite flexible, because the most important thing for them is to work in a certain amount of time but to finish a certain amount of work. Because all of the Pfizer employees are highly skilled and experienced, the interpersonal relationships between the colleagues are also very nice and friendly. Males can just wear business-casual attire. Females do not even have strict dress code. This is not a strict and stressful company, but an innovative and tolerant company.
Besides all of the things I mention above, what I enjoyed the most was the food there. The work place was surrounded by thousands of restaurants with a lot of diversity in food categories. I remember that for the whole month I worked there, I went to a different restaurant every day with my colleagues, and had numerous delicious food for lunch. The lunch breaks were also super long, and my colleagues taught me a lot through chit-chat we had during the break. For just one month I interned there, the boss of the department treated us with fine dinning twice at high-end restaurants.
All I can say is "thank you "to Pfizer. I did not have to suffer from arduous work, but instead learned a lot of experience from the greatest people in this industry. I had a bunch of my “firsts” during this internship. This is my first paid internship. This is my first time to experience a transnational conglomerate, especially a company listed on the Dow. This is my first time to wear suit and tie (though not necessarily) to work like an adult. I received my first grad school offer on the first day of work. After all, this is my first time when I want to leave school as early as possible. Before then, I did not even know what I want to do with my life and just want to continue my identity as a student in the school. After this internship, I found that there is a grander and cooler world outside of the school, and I wanted to experience this society as early as possible. Therefore, I decided to graduate earlier and have more internship instead of more course in my final year. Thank you, Pfizer. Thank you Shanghai.
