My first job after graduation was as a biostatistician for a medical device subsidiary of Becton Dickinson, Inc. The director of statistics from the corporate headquarters commented to me that he found working as a statistician in the medical device industry much more exciting than his experience in the pharmaceutical industry. In the pharmaceutical industry, he explained, it takes several years to complete a clinical trial, while for medical devices, the clinical trials are completed in less than a year. So, you get to see the results of your work much faster and then move on to a new problem. That seems like an amusing contrast now. In the university setting, I frequently complete consulting projects in less than a week, and the projects just keep coming.
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