Summer internships at Pure Drug Safety

Life as a summer intern at Pure Drug Safety in 2020 was pretty different from previous years, as you might expect!

Click on the image to read The Wire

With many business cancelling their summer internship offers to second year university students, Carol Kingstone from PDS was determined to find a way to still allow some students to get a taste of what working life might be like.

She said: “We’ve been welcoming undergraduates on summer internships at PDS for many years and we know how important this experience of corporate life is to them before they start their final year of studies.

“Despite the impact that coronavirus had on many businesses, PDS was relatively unaffected as our client support and projects in the pharmaceutical world became increasingly more important and meant that we didn’t stop delivering at all.”

Carol continues: “Because of this, the manpower and added value that our summer interns would bring was vital in helping us continue with business as normal. But instead of all being in the office together, we created virtual offices online where we worked together, had meetings and collaborated on projects and our interns were included in this as well. Our online offices are still working extremely well, which is a plus for us as the second wave of COVID appears to be taking hold. Despite my initial doubts, this is has proved to be an incredibly successful way of working and means that there is no interruption in the excellent service PDS delivers to its clients.

“The interns were keen and hardworking, confidently turning their hands to the tasks we gave them. But we also wanted the interns to showcase some of the skills they had learned with us too, so we tasked them with resurrecting our PDS newsletter, The Wire. We let them have creative free rein and have pleasure in showing you their work. Click here to see it. I’m sure they would also appreciate any feedback you might have, so feel free to email me your thoughts.”

Carol finishes: “This opportunity to work remotely with our intern colleagues, despite being thrust upon us by circumstance rather than by choice, was in fact very successful. So much so that we will continue exploring new ways to continue working this effectively with all our intern colleagues in the future.

“In the meantime, I would like to thank Lottie and Rose, our 2020 Summer Interns for their hard work and commitment to PDS whilst they were with us, we all wish them the very best in their continuing studies.”