Pros
I started working as an Associate after having completed the Fellowship program. The internship was as I expected a science-based internship to be: it gives you the possibility to branch out from academic life, while remaining deep in creative science. However, the internship does not provide business training. Flagship is a great place for people who have a self-starter mentality, see currently missing therapeutic opportunities in the healthcare sector and want to come up with their own ideas to fill those gaps. But Flagship is perhaps less suited for people who wish to implement other people’s scientific ideas. Flagship is a very well-known name in the biotech scene. It has been highly prolific in the past 20 years and the high pace of the internship reflects the high level of ambition and productivity. Therefore, don’t expect a 9-5 day, as it can really be quite intense. But the experience and brand name on the resume go a long way and opened many doors for me at other VC and biotech firms. As an Associate, I have been given the liberty to work on science that I find interesting and I am expected to come up with and implement my own scientific ideas. I don’t think there are many other places that provide such a degree of scientific freedom. In addition, Flagship has a lot of trust in its Associates in running and managing the seed-funded companies, which provides a great hands-on training on various aspects of the company creation process (ideation to IP, recruiting, growing a larger organization, …).
Cons
Historically, Flagship did not provide much structured training and every Associate got quite different exposure to the operations of the portfolio companies. However, over the last year, Flagship has been taking a lot of efforts to improve this with professional operations staff and training courses.