Abbott Laboratories Internships

This summer I worked for the Quality organization in Abbott’s Global Pharmaceutical Operations (GPO) division in the Document Management Transformation Program team, which is a part of the Manufacturing Quality Assurance (MQA) service area. My projects included:

- Analyzing pilot data on a new change control process and creating a 20-slide presentation to support recommendations to senior management
- Developing and assembling a poster presentation about my contributions for an intern poster session
- Writing and editing macros to automate the sorting and filtering of desired data from spreadsheets with over 55,000 rows
- Creating and maintaining a spreadsheet to track requisitions for deployment expenditures totaling $450,000 at 26 global sites

I was surprised at how much responsibility I was given as an intern. Although I was only at Abbott Labs for a few months, my managers and coworkers made me feel like I was a part of the team. My work individually contributed to the bigger picture of the team’s goals, and it was crucial that I completed my projects correctly.

I followed a training matrix similar to those of the full-time employees here. This included reading documents such as company policies and procedures, as well as more specific computer-based training on topics such as Good Manufacturing Practices, Class A, Six Sigma, and Lean. I also participated in a workshop on Lean Value Stream Mapping.

What I like most about this internship is the freedom I’ve been given to manage my own time and schedule. Abbott does a great job making interns feel like full-time employees: I was given my own desk, phone, computer, and Lotus account, all the tools needed to get my work done and organize my time. While I received my projects, deadlines, and frequent guidance and feedback from my managers, I was in charge of putting together my schedule and prioritizing my tasks. This allowed me to spend some time learning more about the company in addition to working on my main projects.

This internship was valuable to me because it gave me a glimpse of the working world and how it relates to academics. Although my internship was more related to business as opposed to purely technical engineering, I found that I did use my engineering background to understand the reasoning and logic behind the documentation, as well as the process flows and how they would be impacted by changes in documentation. The analytical thinking and problem solving skills I gained from engineering was very useful in this internship as I worked through my projects, and this has given me a new appreciation for my academic background.

- Real world experience.
- Very interest marketing research. Abbott is terrific at understanding the market.
- Able to work with nurses to build marketing plan.
- Abbott gives you a prefect balanca of freedom and management help.

- Don't know if they used my work.
- Wish I got to see more product line.

The best place to learn consumer healthcare marketing. Great culture.

- Facility is pretty cool, especially where they are creating products.
- Freedom to follow the projects I was interested in.
- My group worked a little like an internal ad agency, which was an interesting/fun way to operate.
- Good people.
- Well known company.

- Occasionally bored.
- Some of the design projects were for internal use only.

Graphic design is a good field to be in and if you can learn some web development, you'll be in high demand.

- Nice people at Abbott.
- Projects were interesting: interactive map of Abbott internal sites used for management and presented a plan for technology collaboration amongst teams to the information officer.
- Access to execs.
- Events.
- Flexible schedule.

It's always a little odd to work in technology for a company in which technology isn't it's core product.

- Get freedom.
- Take on big projects and don't ask to be hand held.