Just as many students have experienced, after a stressful period looking for an internship and receiving lots of rejections, I am grateful to have found NLC Health Ventures to do my internship. This is a great opportunity as it helps me to tap into healthcare industry, a field that my previous experiences have rooted in. It also opens the door to explore new facets of one’s career interest. At NLC, I have the chance to see how healthcare interacts with investment and the business world.
Sourcing Talents
My job at NLC belongs to the Talent Acquisition department. Together with my colleagues, we need to source and actively reach out to passive candidates that we think will be a good fit to a current venture NLC is developing. The selection standard is different according to different domains of healthtech the venture belongs to, namely MedTech, BioTech, and digital technology. It is important to also take the stages of the ventures into consideration. For example, for a technology that is still at its early stage, the experience in research and product development is more important, while in later stage, the commercialization and business strategies come to priority. To understand such requirements, close contact with the venture developer and the venture partners are important. The main tool for talent sourcing is LinkedIn Recruiter. In a collaborative mode, my colleagues and I put together the ideal profiles in the pipeline, and reach out to them via LinkedIn messages. We also need to regularly scan the candidates’ resumes on our Applicant Tracking System and change their stages for declining or further interviews.
Assessing quality of CEOs
The other major duty of my internship is to assist the Talent Acquisition Lead to assess the CEO’s quality of each venture. During this internship, I applied the knowledge of randomized sampling to come up with a representative sample of our portfolio ventures and drafted an interview guides to both internal venture support team and to CEOs. By interviewing the venture support team, I got to know the history of each venture and NLC in general. As much as I learn, both internal and external factors could largely affect one’s executive function, such as working remotely, having multiple roles while working, or cultural fit with the inventor. With this, I can see a glimpse of how difficult it is to achieve and maintain a company’s success—it really requires the joint effort from every party that is involved.
Feel-at-home Atmosphere
What I was worried about working in a company is its vibe. My colleagues are many years older than me, and have rich experience working in this field. I was afraid that I couldn’t get used to a “corporate life” at the beginning. However, my manager has reassured me to reach out to anyone if I have any questions, and they will be more than happy to answer. And the atmosphere in our team is really warm. We remember each other’s birthday, throwing surprise “meeting” for them. One of my managers was expecting his second child to be born soon, and the whole team prepared a baby shower to celebrate that. This really help me to overcome the nervousness at the beginning and to help the team more effectively, after knowing more of each other.
Epilogue
In conclusion, my internship at NLC was great. I learned a lot of things, both in expertise and as a person. This might not be your typical Communication Science student’s internship experience, but I believe that’s how communication science allows and prepares us to various career paths.