The Roche Academy internship program is an early in career pipeline program into Roche Diagnostics, according to the official program director for Roche Academy Christine Krull. The internship program is offered strictly to University of Indianapolis STEM students. Amanda Robinson, assistant director of science technology, engineering & math careers in the Professional Edge Center, is in charge of the UIndy side of Roche Academy through her job as a career coach to STEM students. She said she would describe Roche Diagnostics as the Google for medical diagnostic companies. A program called Summer at Roche is open to all majors and, if accepted, each comes with an impressive list of benefits outside of potential full-time employment, according to Krull.
“[The internship] looks fantastic on your resume. If you’re going on to professional schools like med[ical] school, physicians assistant school, dental school, those sorts of things, it helps build your professional network before you ever graduate college … ,” Robinson said. “That puts them ahead of the pack when it comes to their work ethic, understanding business needs, understanding client needs…. It gives them a lot of inside information to a world that’s usually not available to college students, [that world] being the working world.”
The Roche Academy internship program for STEM students specifically offers a curriculum path that Krull said she strongly recommends as it allows students to be most prepared for the program. This is not to say that current upperclassmen or lower classmen cannot apply. This is because part of the curriculum path requires upper level classes that cannot be taken as underclassmen, Krull said.
“The good thing is if a student learns about Roche Academy kind of late in their education, that’s not horrible because Roche recommends … biochemistry and instrumentation techniques as the courses they recommend … ,” Robinson said. “But those are actually advanced level courses that you wouldn’t be able to get to probably until your junior year anyway.”
While the Roche Academy internship program through UIndy is specifically for STEM majors, for students in other majors or even recent graduates, there is still an opportunity with Roche called Summer at Roche, according to Krull. This program does not offer the same benefits and is not directly through UIndy, but it is still an internship through Roche Diagnostics and includes its own benefits, Krull said.
“Can people who aren’t in those programs apply? Absolutely … ,” Krull said. “We also have a Roche internship program so people are welcome to apply for Summer at Roche, which is our larger internship program. [The] difference is that is truly an internship program, it’s not as much of a pipeline to full time employment like the Roche Academy is.”
The partnership between UIndy and Roche Academy is a rather new program and right now is only offered to STEM students, but according to Robinson, this is just the beginning.
“Right now Roche Academy is just for the three sciences—biology, chemistry and medical lab science and then now engineering—but once we get Roche Academy up and running with this new engineering [program], Chris [Krull] wants to again expand and open Roche up to communication majors, marketing majors, those sort of things, so it’s in the works,” Robinson said. “It’s definitely on their radar to get done.”
