A Day in the Life of a Pro Bono Analyst

I arrive in the office just before 9:00am and head to the kitchen to make my morning green tea. There are always a few other people arriving around this time too, and it’s nice to say good morning and have a mini catch-up with some friendly faces!

My day starts with checking my emails – as we work with colleagues and clients across the globe, it’s not unusual for messages to come in overnight from a Statistician in Singapore or an expert clinician in the US. I reply to anything that only requires a speedy response and add anything else to my to-do list for the day.

I head to one of the meeting rooms in the office for a call with a commercial client. Excitingly, today we will be kicking off a new project which involves writing a manuscript, so I come prepared with some slides to discuss the content that we might want to include and how we might want to structure it. It’s helpful to have these discussions to understand what is important to the client and to plan timelines for the project, and it’s always interesting to hear from experts in the field. By the end of the call, we have a good idea what the manuscript will look like and I have everything I need to start drafting a project outline.

I return to my desk to begin reviewing some of the applications for our Pro Bono Call for Projects. We put out these calls once per quarter and each has a specific theme. This time it’s Rare Diseases, and we have many exciting applications for projects which will make a big impact on underserved rare disease communities. Later in the week, I’ll have a meeting with other members of the division to decide which projects to take forward. I really enjoy getting involved with tasks like this to drive forward our progress as a division and learn about a variety of new disease areas at the same time.

Twice a week, I go out for a half-hour run with some of my colleagues to get some exercise and fresh air. I really enjoy the flexibility of being able to take up to a 90-minute lunch break, as it means I still have time to shower and have lunch with my colleagues afterwards! I always feel really refreshed after these breaks and arrive back at my desk ready to take on the rest of the afternoon.

I have several internal catch-up meetings for some of the different pro bono projects I’m working on at the moment. These include a literature review for a charity advocating for young people with allergies, a manuscript on the trial of a new healthcare intervention in sub-Saharan Africa and developing a newsletter template for a charity focused on humanitarian responses to disasters and emergencies. These internal meetings help our Costello Medical teams prioritise and allocate different tasks for the week and are helpful for planning what the rest of my week will look like.

With all my internal catch-up meetings scheduled in one solid block, I now have a good chunk of time to get stuck into a big task and begin work on a slide deck for a pro bono client focused on a rare neurological disease. We have completed a literature search and gap analysis to support development of the charity’s research strategy and discussed the findings and next steps with experts in the disease area. Creating a slide deck to summarise all this work into a final deliverable for the client is very satisfying! Once I’ve finished drafting the deck, it goes to my project manager, who will review it to make sure it’s the best it can be before it goes back to the authors for the next round of review.

Having reached the end of my day, I finish by sending a quick update on today’s progress to my project managers and having a quick look at tomorrow’s to-do list before heading to an evening yoga class.