Statistical Programming Placement Student Review

For the first six months of my placement, I was learning SAS (a programming language used for statistical analysis) through online courses. Before starting my placement, I had no experience or knowledge of SAS. The languages I had experience in were MATLAB and a brief introduction to Python. However, by having these programming skills, I was able to pick up SAS quickly because a lot of the skills in programming are transferable. Once my SAS training was complete and I felt more confident programming independently, I started working on my first study. The study was investigating the drug Daratumumab or more commonly known as Darzalex. Daratumumab is a monoclonal antibody drug used in the treatment of multiple myeloma. This study was evaluating the safety of Daratumumab without corticosteroids. Corticosteroids suppress the immune system which might reduce the efficacy of the immune therapy drugs that treat cancer. My tasks were to Quality Check (QC) datasets and tables produced for this study. QC is recreating statistical and analytical data and cross-checking them against an analysis table. This is a way of validating and ensuring no errors exist in the data. I also checked the tables for mistakes (e.g., spelling mistakes, missing values, missing variables etc.). The tables also had to follow a specification that outlined the layout and variables for these analysis tables.

Yes, I have developed my technical and soft skills. Soft skills: Organisational, teamwork, independence, communication, Technical skills: Excel, SAS, R, Documentation

Yes, however this role does require 6 months of training that includes learning how to code in SAS. But once I had completed my trainings, I was put in a team and given work that I could do independently. I was treated like an employee and given enough work that gave me experience of working in the pharmaceutical industry

I had received lots of support. Everyone was willing to help or if they couldn’t they would make sure they would find someone who can. I felt confident in asking team members and the people who I worked with. Therefore I always got the help and support I needed.

Since we were working from home, we had little interactions than we would if we were in the office. But overall everyone was nice and generous. We had zoom meetings weekly which were used as a catch-up and a general chat time.

I enjoyed it very much. Working from home helped as well but I gained so much from this experience. I also had another placement student with me so I was not completely alone and we worked together on some projects and helped each other.

Yes

Johnson and Johnson is healthcare multinational corporation. J&J operates through three segments: Consumer, Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices. So make sure you know which segment you are applying for and research the work they do. My placement was at Janssen – pharmaceutical companies of J&J. The values that guide the business are spelled out in their Credo and they are very focused on that. So read and understand the credo.