I always wanted to find cures to diseases for which no cure existed. With that desire, I went into graduate school to become a scientist and endured all that is endured: the long days, nights and weekends in the lab, doing experiments that added just one little piece to the puzzle of science; the frustration of failed experiments and low budgets; the work with thousands of mice (I actually counted over 3000 mice sacrificed over my graduate school career). But I was happy because I was on the road to becoming a scientist and finding a vaccine for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

In graduate school, I also learned about the different work options for scientists, looking around and learning that to do research you had to be an academic. I was attending a prestigious Ivy League institution, working with prestigious faculty that conducted top-notch research, and publishing in big name journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. In that environment, anything but academia was considered suboptimal.

But, really, what else was there outside of academia? At the time, there was the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was almost as good as being an academic, although not quite as good because NIH did not enroll students and as a postdoc there you did not learn how to write grants. The other alternative was industry. At that time, I was not really interested in other options as I thought I was on the highway to become an academic. Then came the call.

My thesis advisor had published an article in Nature Medicine describing some studies treating cancer in mice. The data was really exciting and it received great media coverage. Within a couple of days of the news, I answered the lab phone. A man wanted to speak to my advisor who was out of town. He wanted to know if the treatment described in the newspaper was available because he had prostate cancer and wanted to try this new approach. I had to explain to him that it was just a mouse model for a potential treatment, but it would take years before it would be available to the general population. At that moment I asked myself, is this really the road I want to take?

A couple years passed and we were hosting a seminar speaker who used to be a professor in our department, got fed up with academia, joined industry and was loving life, doing all sorts of interesting work in drug development. We went out for lunch, and he told us of all the wonderful developments in industry. I remember clearly some students arguing that in academia there was intellectual freedom unlike in industry, and him explaining that a professor considered an expert on a particular subject would not get funding in an unrelated area if s/he wanted to explore a new area of research. On the other hand, he argued, people in industry switched all the time, going from one therapeutic area to another, moving from cancer to cardiovascular to infectious diseases. If you wanted to try something new, he explained, you could write a proposal and do some work with it or simply change jobs. This was truly the first time that I considered industry as a possibility. I had seen the first exit sign.

A while later, I attended a symposium hosted in one of the big Pharma local sites. I must admit that I was a bit smitten with the environment: the nice open library in the middle of the building, the great looking cafeteria, the beautiful grounds with the pond, and the free gym. But I also had the chance to speak to some of the scientists, and they did not sound as incompetent as the academics tried to portray them. In fact, they sounded quite smart and really excited about their work, which included finding cures for diseases with no known treatments. Looking back, I realize that that was a turning point for me, the moment when I changed lanes to get off the highway.

I finished my Ph.D. and went on to do a postdoc in academia conducting basic research and giving myself one last chance to look at my options. Still not wanting to appear as if I couldn’t cut it in academia, but, at that point, I had pretty much figured out that academia was not for me. I was meant for industry.

A couple of years into my first industry job, I was at an off-site meeting and some colleagues and I had gone out for dinner at a sushi bar. Halfway through dinner, I had to borrow someone’s cell phone and went outside to call into a teleconference with the clinical investigators for one of our trials. During the call, one of the investigators reported that a patient in the trial had a complete remission of their tumor. At that moment, I had fulfilled my dream: we were curing people.

I never really had an awakening experience or change of heart when I knew that I would leave academia for industry. I just refined my career path. To get from point A to point B, we may all need to start on the highway, but as we get closer, we take our separate ways through smaller roads until we reach our final destination. I wanted to discover treatments and help people, and I found that working in Biopharma was the street where my heart resided.