By Amrita Dasgupta T'16
Amrita is a second-year student at Tuck with a background in operations strategy and big data analytics. Her hometown is in Bethesda, MD, but she is excited to see where the next stage of life and her career will take her.
After making it through my first year and winter in New Hampshire, I had the incredible opportunity to face another extreme: 100F+ degree weather on the blisteringly hot shores of Miami during my summer internship with Danaher Corporation at one of its biotech / life science operating companies.
Danaher is a serious powerhouse of a company with a highly-developed business management strategy. However, as one professor delicately describes it, Danaher’s somewhat “unsexy” product portfolio often keeps it off many an MBA’s radar. I’d only heard of it in passing, but during recruiting season, a Tuck alum and Danaher recruit reached out to me to tell me about the company. One very effective sell later, that’s where I decided I’d have the most fulfilling and challenging summer experience. It lived up to that expectation.
The company prides itself on a rigorous internship program, challenging you to navigate through a high level of ambiguity to chart your own course and demonstrate general management leadership. From the start of the internship, I had to hit the ground running and exercise a semi-retired engineering muscle to read through hundreds of pages of scientific documents to understand and internalize the mind-boggling technical details behind hematology—before even beginning to contemplate the challenge of advising a business on its market. My project scope itself was quite open-ended and self-driven: determine and deploy a solution to effect large-scale revenue growth and achieve measurable results within 12 meager weeks—three of which were tied up in training at its Chicago and Washington, D.C. corporate headquarters.
No small challenge, but luckily, support was all around me. When I wanted additional background research, the Feldberg Library and its adept librarians were there to help me. When I wanted targeted advice from an experienced marketing professional, my Tuck professors were an email away. When it came to the nerve-wracking final presentation (to a formidable panel of 8-12 company presidents and C-suite execs, no less), I had the support and advice from a trio of Danaher-Tuckies from different offices around the nation; the same guys, by the way, who helped me work with HR to secure that highly desirable Miami posting from a wide array of operating companies and office locations.
So yes, I’ve definitely been impressed by the Danaher internship, by the opportunities that a Tuck MBA affords us, and by the tangible strength of the Tuck community that we were promised while we deliberated the decision to come here. And as those who know me can attest, I’m not so easily impressed.
Now, as summer winds to an end, I’ve come full circle—nostalgic for good times with good friends back in the Upper Valley, and that heavy barrage of snow and cold that both delights and terrifies us. At least this time I’m going in with a great tan.