Intern – IT Emerging Talent Program
- I was assigned to the Global Regulatory Affairs (GRA) group, housed under Merck Research Labs in Upper Gwynedd, PA. In this role, I supported the IT systems that govern and assist the authoring, planning, and submission of drug documentation to the Food and Drug Administration and its international counterparts. Specifically, I created data visualizations using TIBCO Spotfire and JavaScript, designed wireframe diagrams of new tools in the pipeline, and assisted with an effort to document the IT architecture of the GRA group.
- Notable Projects:
- GRA IT Socialization – This initiative was intended to make the often-tricky landscape of regulatory IT easier to digest for any Merck employee who sought more information on the division. My role included researching major GRA systems and their applications and mapping the end-to-end drug submission process in TIBCO Nimbus, a process mapping tool.
- Country Digital Experience – The Country Digital Experience is a project designed to reconcile the numerous global and local regulatory tools each country Merck does business in uses by researching country requirements and deploying a consistent global solution across the enterprise. My role was to create wireframe diagrams detailing the UI of a proposed global solution.
- Change Network Visualization – This non-GRA effort was designed to visualize various networks of people within Merck. The goal was to draw meaningful conclusions about geographic locations, discover network overlaps, and identify heavily connected employees who would be effective change management and communication leaders. To complete this task, I created maps in TIBCO Spotfire, and an interactive node chart entirely in JavaScript.
- The most beneficial lessons from my internship came from my experience designing the JavaScript node chart. I was able to reinforce and expand upon my knowledge of JavaScript gained from MIS 2402, and become more familiar with unstructured data, mainly CSV and JSON, as taught in MIS 2502.