My position as a DQL helped me enhance my leadership and project management skills due to the extensive study lead training and work. This is mainly due to my responsibilities as a primary point of contact for data management throughout the lifecycle of my assigned study and leader of the data management team. Those responsibilities include regularly leading meetings, creating and reviewing study documents and ensuring they comply with Roche and industry standards, ensuring overall quality of the data and proactively managing timelines of study deliverables.
In addition, I was given the opportunity to develop my R programming skills, through extensive training and project involvement. One of the R projects I completed, was developing and R Shiny app that tracks details of subject discontinuation and produces outputs required to support data cleaning and quality review of clinical trial data.
This placement year has provided me with an extensive understanding of the pharmaceutical industry, the opportunity to build a network, as well as helped me develop valuable technical and soft skills. In fact, I found this year so useful, that when given the opportunity to extend my contract I decided to do so by 2 months, making my placement a 15-month long one that continues all the way until right before my university start date.
Once I go back to university I plan to put all my effort into completing my degree after which I will either pursue a PhD, or return straight back to Data Sciences in the pharmaceutical industry.