Employee Path

Joy

Manager, Statistical Programming

Statistical Programmer (SP) handle the clinical trials data per study requirement and do necessary analysis and reporting support the clinical trial submission to agency.

I began my career at Parexel in 2006, directly after graduation. In my last year at university my professor took me to an open house event at the Parexel Taipei office. I left with good impression about this company and I had interest in clinical research statistical programming, so I applied for a position as a Statistical Programmer as soon as I had graduated.

As part of the programming team, we interact with people who need outputs programmed: This includes colleagues in Clinical Data Management, Biostatistics, Medical Writers, internally and externally. We also interact with our programming counterparts in pharmaceutical companies.

A typical day for me is commuting to the office, checking emails, prioritizing what needs to be done that day so that as soon as I come into office I could start replying to emails and get to my work straightaway. Then, depending on what needs to be done that day, I might start program deliverables, talk to my members regarding issues that happened the previous day, provide training, or organize resources for future tasks. As a mother of a 1 year old, I need to use any precious time I have in the office so I could pick up my child on time after work.

For me, the core of being a programmer with Parexel is providing high quality work as we then contribute to a hopefully good outcome in clinical trials. We can be innovative in finding methods to provide outputs to clients, and all of these definitely involve a lot of communications and team work in the process.

You need to persevere and truly like what you do, as programming involves long periods of sitting in front of a computer, thinking through issues and communicating with others about the requirements. A lot of patience and the willingness to constant learning is also needed. There are thousands of ways to produce the same outputs and everyone does it differently, therefore you could always learn something new in this job.

I love programming. This is why I stayed for nearly 10 years now! I like to focus on programming tasks and find the fastest, easiest way to provide outputs and benefit the clinical trial process. It is truly a blessing how I was able to find a job which involves my interest but also supports me financially!