Matthew Biggins

Roche is a pharmaceutical company based out of Basel, Switzerland. They have offices in many countries across the globe, including their Mississauga office, which is where I worked for my co-op. Roche is the fourth largest pharmaceutical country in the world, and the leading provider of cancer treatments globally.

I had several goals when entering my first co-op work term:

1. My first goal was to improve on my inquiry and analysis skills. My strategy to achieve this goal was to actively engage and participate in clarification meetings for projects throughout my coop term. Doing so helped me become better at inquiring for information needed to successfully complete a project. It also helped me improve my skills related to analysis as I had to analyze the information given to me during clarification meetings.


2. My second goal was to improve my problem-solving skills, which would be helpful for all my future career goals. My strategy to achieve this goal was to work on a variety of projects throughout my coop term, and in doing so, improve on my problem-solving skills. These skills naturally developed while working on projects during my coop term. This is because the projects that I worked on came with a variety of problems and challenges that I had to face while completing them, which in turn helped to improve my problem-solving skills.


3. My third and final goal was to improve my teamwork skills, as working in a team will be a part of almost any job that I may have in the future. My strategy to achieve this goal was to actively work with other coop students while working on projects during my coop term. Doing so helped me to improve my teamwork skills, and it also helped me to achieve my other learning goals as well. This is because working in a team also helped me to develop problem solving skills as well as inquiry and analysis skills.

While at Roche, I worked as a Pharma Technical Analyst within their intern program, FutureWorks. The way FutureWorks operates is that anybody that works at Roche can submit projects to FutureWorks. A FutureWorks intern will then hold a clarification meeting with the project sponsor to learn more about the project, and then whichever intern(s) is interested in the project can choose to work on it. An example of a project that I worked on while at Roche was a sustainable materials database. At Roche, to manufacture the pharmaceutical medications, they use a bunch of different chemicals. And in an effort be more environmentally friendly, as well as cautious about the effects these chemicals have on people's health, Roche utilises a bunch of different spreadsheets and tables from different global organisations to make decisions on what chemicals they use. This however is very time consuming due to the number of sheets they have to analyse to make a decision. The goal of the project was to reduce the amount of time they needed to spend analysing these sheets by putting it all into one, easy to access database. My role while working on this project was to use Python to pull the information from all of the different tables and sheets, and then put all of the data into a Google cloud BigQuery database which was then able to be accessed by an app that the project sponsor had built.

Overall, I found my experience working at Roche to be an overall amazing first co-op experience. I believe that the skills I developed while working at roche will help me to succeed in my future co-op positions and my career after university.

Id like to thank all the FutureWorks interns that I worked with at Roche, who all made my time at Roche amazing. I would also like to thank all my project sponsors for giving me the opportunity to work with them and learn from working on their projects. Finally, I would like to thank my mentor at Roche, Ramzi, who greatly helped me during my term at Roche by giving me extensive career and resume advice.