From Drugs to Business
Being born and raised in Brazil, São Paulo by South Korean immigrants, I couldn’t help but to choose a path where I found myself learning how to make, manipulate and inject drugs, collect blood, run several experiments by applying chemicals, and deal with users and eventually physicians when things went bad. After all, it is what I vowed to devote my professional life for being a pharmacist.
Curiously, being a pharmacist took me where I am and made who I am. I guess God does write straight on tortuous lines. I mean, I was always passionate about creating, designing, drawing, you name it. However, still very young a different perspective and environment made me learn about all kinds of diseases, interesting medicinal plants, ugly parasites, modified genes and so on. The lab coat used to be my uniform for several days of the week while working in plain white perfectly organized laboratories, visiting hospitals for medical rounds, running precise clinical experiments and having to follow every government’s regulation in the pharmaceutical industry.
All of those experiences took me to Korea, where I got in touch with Marketing and Business. From that moment on I knew that it would be worthy learning more about it.
Today I graduate in International business having worked in many different projects with 30+ different nationalities and cultures in the US and in China. All of it was for sure out of a pharmacist comfort zone and somehow very different from labs, hospitals and pharmaceutical industries. However, it was possible and it only helped me to build up a more solid career plan.
The feeling you get by achieving success in a different industry is just amazing. It opens your mind the moment you are in contact with people from different backgrounds. And myself understanding the western and the east culture for living it my entire life, just make me want to learn even more about culture and language from people all over the world.
Therefore, I encourage anyone who has ever doubt of their potential and capabilities to give it a try. To take the opportunity we have being surrounded by so much information and different people to absorb as much as possible and transform it into something that makes the whole difference. I have been through hospitals, labs, scientific research projects, compounding pharmacy (so boring), regulatory affairs (gosh! You’ve gotta like reading), overseas sales, languages tutoring (Portuguese is definitely not easy to teach), general affairs, executive assistance, digital marketing, volunteer for designs and photography, interpreter, PowerPoint workshops and 1-1 tutoring, CRM strategy, and I am still up to explore more. Trust yourself and in your own time you can make anything happen.
