Summer Internship

Summer Internship. All SB2 trainees are required to spend at least 12 weeks in the summer undertaking a full-time internship in a biotechnology/pharmaceutical company in the greater Boston area. During the internship, students will be considered company employees and will not be required to attend any activities at BU (so they can fully immerse themselves in the company experience). In the past five years, trainees have undertaken internships at Ionic Pharmaceuticals, K2 Biotechnologies, Joyn Bio, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Beam Therapeutics, LanzaTech, The Engine, Strand Therapeutics, Vedanta Biosciences, The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), Pfizer, Funga, Pearl Bio, MatTek, Concerto Biosciences, and AstraZeneca. SB2 Trainees earn course credit for their internships, and they can draw their monthly stipend from the T32 training grant if their host company is not able to pay them a salary during their internship – this ensures that none of our trainees are put in a situation where they must work without compensation during their internship.

There are many ways to find a summer internship. Most of the larger biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies in the greater Boston area post positions on their careers page in the late fall (i.e., eight months before the internship would start). For example, if you search ‘2025 Intern’ at the Vertex careers website, you will find the following:

• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Research (Boston, MA)
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Engineering (Boston, MA)
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Biostatistics and Statistical Programming (Boston, MA)
  
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Biopharmaceutical Sciences – Small Molecule (Boston, MA)
  
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Clinical and Quantitative Pharmacology (Boston, MA)
  
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Clinical Data Management & Metrics (Boston, MA)
  
• Vertex Summer 2025 Intern, Data Science, Computational Science, and Analytics (Boston, MA)

You can also create a search at LinkedIn or Indeed for the term ‘intern,’ to get regular updates when internship positions are posted.

If you are interested in working for a smaller company (<50 people), you can search the following sites, which are VC firms and/or start-up incubators that have many companies in their portfolio:

• Flagship Pioneering
• Third Rock Ventures
• RA Capital
• Pillar VC
• The Engine
• LabCentral
• Greentown Labs

There are also internships in STEM companies that do not involve benchwork. For example,

• The Engine’s Technology Venture Fellowship
• The Engine’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship
• Flagship Pioneering Fellowship
• Mass General Brigham Innovation Internship
• Broad Institute’s Science Writing and Communications Internship
• Cell Press’s Science Communications Internship

Another way to find an internship is to identify a company you are interested in working for and seeing if you have any second-degree connections with anyone who works there. Remember to check lab alumni for any BU faculty member you’ve interacted with, as people who graduated from BU usually want to help current graduate students start their careers. If you are interested in finding companies that are doing highly innovative science, look at the portfolio companies at The Engine, LabCentral, Flagship Pioneering, etc. and also lists like these:

• Fierce Biotech’s 2024 Fierce 15, Fierce Biotech’s 2023 Fierce 15, Fierce Biotech’s 2022 Fierce 15, etc..
• STAT‘s Startups page
• Nature Reviews Drug Discovery‘s News & Comment page

If you have any questions, or if you would like to meet up with me to discuss your internship search, please send me an email!

Page updated May 14th, 2025