Magnolia Innovation – Career Advice

SICSFLAGS with Magnolia Innovation
Friday October 30th, 1:30-2:30 pm

Andrew Stokesbury of Magnolia Innovation (MI),  will discuss his transition from Academia (Master of Science in Psychology, Villanova University) to a short stay in market research and then to strategic consulting at Magnolia Innovation.  He will discuss how this process differs from academia, and some pit falls he has seen.  He will explain who Magnolia Innovation is, and what they do, Strategic consulting in the healthcare space.  Andrew will highlight how job applicants have successfully packaged their PhD experience/skills in a way that makes sense for them as a professional services firm in the healthcare space.

Below are some specifics that MI look for in job candidates:

At a high level the key skills for our type of work would be:

  1. Critical thinking/idea synthesis  
  2. The ability to package a story in a concise and easily digestible way.  We need to be able to cut to the heart of the matter and provide credible insight and recommendations
  3. Strong verbal/visual presenting ability.  This tends to be the area where the needs for professional services/consulting and the needs for academia are least aligned. 
    1. Academia tends to want to see everything and have the ability to draw their own conclusions from the data
    2. In consulting, we are being paid to do that synthesis and provide actionable recommendations, we are doing the thinking and coming with the answer fully baked. 

 Specific to Magnolia and our work:

  1. Experience in healthcare
  2. Familiarity with research design methods and ideally market research (interviews & surveys basically)
  3. Familiarity/experience with marketing

The process to apply for an associate position is –  a resume review,  an initial screening call, a follow up screening call, an in-person case study, in-person interviews