Students

Start with environmental studies, throw in some legal training (otherwise known as Columbia Law School), top it off with a Master’s in Public Health and you have the multi-faceted skill set of dual-degree student Guillermo Cuevas.

Interning this summer with Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical’s Law Department, Cuevas has had the opportunity to apply many of his interests and skills to his work. While the internship may appear to be less public health-related than others are, the fact is that his responsibilities touch on many key public health issues: patient privacy rights, clinical study protocols, and drug development.

All in all, the internship provides an excellent opportunity to gain experience in public health and law from the pharmaceutical perspective–something that Bristol-Myers Squibb seemed to take into account when hiring Cuevas. “They seemed very interested in my having the joint-degree perspective,” he says.

Cuevas graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in environmental studies and history. Following graduation he spent nearly three years in the environmental consulting industry focusing on occupational health and safety management and site contamination/remediation issues. To progress in the field, however, it quickly became apparent that he would need more specialized credentials.

Cuevas decided that instead of pursuing a purely scientific path, he would focus on environmental law. After winning admission to Columbia Law School, he learned about the Mailman School of Public Health – and its program in Environmental Health Sciences (EHS). In his first year of law school, he applied to EHS as a dual degree student and was accepted.

Cuevas describes his summer practicum as busy and stimulating. “While the bulk of my work has been in commercial transactions and corporate law,” he explains, “I’ve been exposed to business strategy, the technology side – how drugs are developed, the acquisition side and the manufacturing process–not to mention U.S. pharmaceutical compliance issues regarding how drugs are marketed and sold.”

He also has found that elements from many of his core classes directly relate to pharmaceutical work – especially biostatistics and epidemiology. “We just had a presentation about a new product and it incorporated all of those basic elements like statistical data sets, survivability curves and risk ratios. I felt my ability to follow the presentation might have been a bit better than my fellow legal interns because of my exposure to the subject matter at the public health school.”