Plugged into the Matrix: My Virtual Internship Experience at Bristol Myers Squibb

By Mitchell McBrairty

Kelley MBA Candidate, Class of 2021

One of my favorite films of all time is The Matrix. Watching Neo question reality, choose between the blue and red pills, and discover inner truths about himself is a mind-bending experience. It’s almost as if you leave a different person than you started after watching it.

Leading up to my summer MBA internship at Bristol Myers Squibb, it felt like I was Neo hacking at his computer and discovering a new world. I’ll be honest, I was very nervous about what lied ahead, but maybe not for the same reason as some of my classmates. The corporate world for me represented an entirely new beast. My pre-MBA career was as a scientist at a startup that had 5 employees. If I ever needed any help, I could walk into the CEO’s office anytime and solve the problem right then and there. Communication was never a problem. Now I had to learn to navigate the corporate environment, while only connecting virtually.

Bristol Myers Squibb is a matrixed organization, which added another layer of communication complexity. From the outside looking in, I found it difficult to understand who is responsible for which projects, and how to identify the right internal stakeholders to solve your problem. But luckily for me, they assigned me the perfect project to learn and grow into the corporate world: Developing an internal communications plan for a new team in the medical organization at BMS.

The beginning of the internship is filled with ambiguity, and the process of scoping the project for the short 10 weeks is a crucial part of success. This cannot be understated: it turns the vague business need into a concrete and actionable plan that narrows the many possibilities for the internship into one reality. This is achieved by communicating across the different stakeholders and continuing to learn from their perspectives. This uncovers how things currently work and how you can specifically address the problems they face. In a virtual internship, this is done through many video conference meetings that can oftentimes feel like The Matrix’s war against the machines.

It also was important to realize that this was not only an internship for me to finish a project for BMS, but also a learning experience to understand how the industry operates and to identify the potential teams that interest me. Part of this process is to find a good mentor. In the case of BMS, I was assigned two different mentors that were instrumental in understanding how the company operates both at the level of my peers and the senior leadership. This organically led to great conversations that allowed me to identify more people within the matrix that could give additional insights into different areas of the business, and the cycle continued. After so many conversations, all of the different pieces seem to fit into place, and before I knew it the 10 weeks had quickly flown by.

In the end, the internship isn’t so different than any other project. It’s important to have a clear plan, prioritize tasks and balance your time, find and use your mentors, and finish strong. Don’t forget to enjoy the ride! I think my experience can best be described as a quote from The Matrix,

“No one can be told what The Matrix is. You’ll have to see it for yourself” – Morpheus