My Co-Op Experience at Johnson & Johnson

This past spring, I did a six-month virtual co-op at Johnson & Johnson, more specifically, Janssen.

This is my first true internship/co-op experience and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.

Everyone these days knows Janssen. Throughout the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson and the Janssen vaccine were front and center for creating a COVID vaccine that was only one dose. Working at such a prevalent company during these hard times was such an amazing experience.

My Experience

During my six months at Janssen, I was a part of the Bioresearch Quality & Compliance group’s Data Science team as a Data Analyst Co-Op.

Coming in, I had no clue what my job was supposed to entail. It felt like everyone was working on something different and I was given a lot of freedom in what direction I could’ve gone.

After talking with my manager/mentor Deepak, we decided I would work on two projects during my six months: Question Answering and Text Summarization.

Text Summarization

This was something I dabbled in with my research at the National Intelligence University but was never able to fully delve into it because I lacked the hardware to train models. While at Johnson and Johnson, we used a product called Domino Data Lab which allowed me to train models on more expensive and robust computers. It was a fascinating experience to be able to fine-tune models with data collected from Johnson and Johnson.

Question Answering

This was something completely new that I’ve never tried before and was super excited when Deepak brought it up as a potential co-op project. Since this was something completely new for the company and I, I feel a great sense of pride in being able to learn how to implement question answering and build a web app all by myself.

Conclusion

It was hard work but very rewarding when I got to demo working prototypes to the people who would benefit from my work. I was able to create two web apps that would boost productivity at Janssen.

I was able to learn a lot from Deepak and the rest of the team/co-op during my six months there. I was not only able to create two applications, I was also able to talk with the people who were actually using what I built to get feedback on how to make it better.

Working at Johnson and Johnson was such a fruitful experience and I’m so glad it was my first co-op internship.