I did a pharma internship during my PhD and it cemented my intent to go to industry. It was really the people that I met who convinced me. People in meetings would make sure that everyone in the room understood what was going on, and they were really welcoming of criticism and had backup slides at hand to explain their experiments/results to newbies from other fields. I’d impose myself on random people in the cafeteria and ended up learning a lot about animal testing, scale-up chemistry, project management, and a bunch of other jobs in the company. Managers did a good job of keeping meetings on track when discussion went off the rails or people got into spats.

Going back to grad school after the internship was a culture shock - after I’d seen effective teams, academic collaborations just looked like on-paper money grabs to get grants with a monthly zoom call to keep up appearances. People would give talks with no consideration for whether the audience was following, and lunchtime conversations were people trying to convince me that they’re very smart, without making a convincing case that they were doing their research right. I just got this overwhelming feeling that academia was structured in a way where I’d tire myself out fighting against badly incentivized people instead of banging my head against scientific problems.

The pharma money stuff is sketchy, but I tell myself that at least pharma makes drugs that will (in the worst case) eventually go off-patent. After my PhD some specific circumstances had me land my first job in the open source/nonprofit space, but my next stop if I leave this job will very likely be biotech/pharma.