by C.Ozawa » Mon Jul 17, 2006 10:24 pm
Well, its certainly hard to sum up a typical day in the life, but here's an attempt (this is probably the hardest question I get!)
We work with a variety of clients across industries on all sorts of problems. In healthcare, clients include biotech, pharma, medical device, insurance companies, providers (e.g. hospitals), and non-profit organizations. My work has focused on biotech (largely) and some med device and pharma work.
The types of problems I focused on as an associate (starting position in my firm) ranged from developing a sales and marketing strategy for a newly launch biotech product, to doing an assessment of the market potential of a portfolio of compounds as part of a biotech licensing deal, to working with a national cancer patient advocacy group to develop a coalition of industry partners to assess the impact of Medicare changes on cancer patient access to care, to developing a strategy for entry into the healthcare space for a high tech company. As you can imagine, the day to day changes a lot across projects (and variety is one of the main things I enjoy from the job)!
So, on a typical day as an associate, you can be doing everything from interviewing scientists and physicians to get their perspectives on a market or product/new technology, to running a financial analysis of revenue impact of some change in the market, to reading analyst reports to get a handle on investor expectations, to interviewing exceutives at companies, to meeting with clients to present the team's findings and discuss the analyses you have been working on. Constants are 1)while you have an independent piece of the overall problem you are working on, you are always working as part of a team and always have people to test your ideas with and get input into your work, 2) the nature of the work is very analytical and quite intellectually challenging (as you can imagine, "getting smart" on new topics at the start of each project provides a steep learning curve, and because the problems we sholve are usually quite tough, require a lot of intellectual creativity and effort), and 3) it's never the same project to project.
Hope this helps a bit...