by Willy Franzen on March 12, 2010
This is your last chance. If you want your voice heard, please take 3 minutes (seriously, it’s short) to complete our One Day, One Job survey.

If you woke up this morning with a sore throat, what would you do? I bet many of you would get on the computer, type your symptoms into Google, and probably end up on WebMD trying to self-diagnose. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing (maybe we should leave the diagnosing for the doctors), but it’s how most of us operate these days. We have a remarkable amount of medical information available at our fingertips, and WebMD, which is based in NYC with a significant presence in a number of other cities, is responsible for a lot of it. They consider themselves “the leading provider of health information services, serving consumers, physicians, other healthcare professionals, employers and health plans.” If you read that closely, you probably noticed that WebMD’s business goes well beyond their consumer facing website.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
account management,
all employers,
Canada,
customer service,
design,
education,
health care,
Indiana,
medicine,
New York,
Oregon,
project management,
puerto rico,
sales,
software development,
web development,
writing
by Willy Franzen on January 28, 2010

One of the books that I’ve been reading lately is SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
. It’s a great follow-up to the original Freakonomics
, and it once again shows how changing your mindset can lead you to all kinds of new ideas (this is a really important lesson for job seekers). One of the companies that is mentioned in the book is Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, WA based invention company. They’re all about ideas. Things like product design, product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service all come later, and Intellectual Ventures doesn’t want anything thing to do with those processes. They just invent, invent, invent. The company isn’t tied to one specific area—they’re working on problems like stopping Malaria, preventing hurricanes, and counteracting negative effects from climate change should they ever happen.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
California,
chemistry,
energy,
engineering,
India,
information technology,
international,
Japan,
medicine,
physics,
product development,
research,
science,
Singapore,
software development,
South Korea,
Texas,
user experience,
Washington
by Willy Franzen on December 27, 2009
I was traveling yesterday, so I scheduled yesterday’s post and hopped on a plane. Little did I know that my server would somehow forget to do what I told it. Sorry! If you’re looking for yesterday’s post, you can find it here. (Or if you’re reading by e-mail, just scroll down.)

There are a lot of people who aren’t very thrilled with healthcare in the United States. Yes, it can be atrociously expensive, but at least we have access to pretty much any medical procedure out there. Whether it’s something very basic or something that has never been tried before, the US certainly has the medical infrastructure to get the job done. There are plenty of countries in the world where even the most basic medical care is out of reach, and there are other countries where basic medical care becomes out of reach due to a crisis. That’s where New York City based Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) comes in. They provide “aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters.” Doctors Without Borders does this by recruiting both medical and non-medical personnel to travel abroad to offer a level of medical assistance that is well beyond what is typically available.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
communications,
health care,
information technology,
international,
medicine,
New York,
non-profit,
outreach
by Willy Franzen on December 20, 2009

Last night I went to an event for National Coaching Fellows (I’m on their board). It was held at an art gallery, and it went extremely well. For the past few years, the organization has been struggling to feel legitimate (that’s a common problem with startups, non-profit or for-profit). Holding an event at a place with expensive art on the walls made a drastic difference—it felt real. Even though I’m not all that interested in art, there was no doubt in my mind that the art on the walls played a huge role in the mood of the event. RxArt is a New York City based non-profit that is taking advantage of this effect in a very different way. They curate contemporary art exhibitions in healthcare facilities to “relieve stress and anxiety, while increasing appreciation for contemporary art” for patients and staff. Considering how cold hospitals and doctor’s offices usually feel, I think this is an amazing idea.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
administrative,
all employers,
arts,
development,
health care,
medicine,
New York,
non-profit
by Willy Franzen on June 13, 2009

There are countless celebrities who support charitable causes. There are many who throw their full support behind a single organization; however, few celebs are as personally invested in their charitable work as Michael J. Fox is. Why is he so invested? Because his life is on the line. He is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, “a degenerative disease of the brain that often impairs motor skills, speech, and other functions.” If you’ve seen Michael J. Fox on tv lately, you’ve seen what Parkinson’s does to the human body. It’s a tragic disease that will hopefully be cured due to the work of the New York City based Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. As an accomplished actor and someone who is living with Parkinson’s, Michael J. Fox is the perfect person to lead the fight against the disease.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
advocacy,
all employers,
development,
grant writing,
medicine,
New York,
non-profit,
research
by Willy Franzen on June 6, 2009

Most scientific literature isn’t what I’d call an easy read, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you aren’t beating down the doors to get your hands on the newest research papers. Unless you are a big consumer of research literature, then you probably don’t care much about the openness of scientific and medical publishing, but you should. Open sharing of information can significantly promote innovation, and who can argue against wanting more advances in science and medicine? The Public Library of Science is all about open sharing, as they are a San Francisco, CA based “nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.” They were founded in 2000, and since then they’ve been pushing for scientific and medical journals that “are immediately available online, with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use.”
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
California,
editing,
engineering,
medicine,
non-profit,
publishing,
quality engineer,
research,
science
by Willy Franzen on March 29, 2009

It’s no secret that poverty and poor health are deeply related. Limited access to healthcare is part of the reason, but there’s a lot more to the story. Nearly everything that we do in our lives has some bearing on our health outcomes, and a life in poverty creates factor after factor that leads to poor health outcomes. Project HEALTH is a non-profit organization that works in Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Providence, RI; and Washington, DC to break “the link between poverty and poor health.” Honestly, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think that poverty and poor health will forever be intertwined, but battling poverty will be the key to creating better health outcomes for lower-income people. I guess it all depends on how you define poverty.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
health care,
Illinois,
Maryland,
Massachusetts,
medicine,
New York,
non-profit,
outreach,
program development,
Rhode Island,
Washington DC
by Willy Franzen on January 17, 2009

Today on One Day, One Internship we’re taking a look at internships with the Space Studies Board. That brought our attention to The National Academies, which is a non-profit organization that consists of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and the United States National Research Council (NRC). Although it may sound like they’re government agencies, they’re not. They do, however, get most of their funding from federal and state agencies. Despite that fact, they remain independent when advising the nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
accounting,
all employers,
finance,
medicine,
non-profit,
research,
science,
Washington DC
by Willy Franzen on August 7, 2008

Imagine getting a job as a MythBuster, except instead of debunking urban legend, you’re investigating real life problems that plague businesses and sometimes hurt people. That’s what you could be doing at Exponent. Founded in 1967 by five Ph.D.-level researchers, Exponent was originally known as Failure Analysis Associates. They started out in the energy industry studying stress and fracture mechanics, but very quickly they were “investigating and analyzing accidents and failures of all kinds.” They eventually became The Failure Group, and were listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker FAIL. In 1998 they realized that they had outgrown their name, and changed again to Exponent, because it means “one who expounds or interprets.” We don’t usually get so deep into how a company chooses it’s name, but with the popularity of the FAIL meme (see also: FAIL Blog), we thought that you might be amused.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
Arizona,
automotive,
California,
consulting,
engineering,
Illinois,
Maryland,
Massachusetts,
medicine,
New York,
Pennsylvania,
physics,
research,
science,
transportation,
Virginia,
Washington,
Washington DC
by Willy Franzen on July 5, 2008

We hope you had a safe 4th of July. Unfortunately, every year some people don’t. Fireworks are a lot of fun, but they can result in some really nasty burns and injuries. Since we encouraged you to blow stuff up yesterday, we thought we’d counter that by featuring a non-profit organization that helps children who endure severe burns. The Shriners Hospitals for Children do exactly that. Who are Shriners? They wear funny hats. They drive little cars in parades. They’re Freemasons. And most importantly, they help kids through their hospitals. That’s going to be our focus today, since new college grads probably aren’t too interested in being part of a fraternal organization that seems like it probably has an average age north of 60. Then again, you probably got all hot and bothered about your college’s greek organizations and secret societies.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
California,
Canada,
Hawaii,
Illinois,
international,
Kentucky,
Louisiana,
Massachusetts,
medicine,
Mexico,
Minnesota,
Missouri,
non-profit,
Ohio,
Oregon,
Pennsylvania,
South Carolina,
Texas,
Utah,
Washington
by Willy Franzen on June 10, 2008

We didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. We were slightly distracted by the events going on at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where Apple announced a 3G iPhone along with some amazing software updates, and a daytime Yankees game on tv. A lot of people complained that too much time was spent at WWDC talking about software, but we couldn’t get enough of it. A couple really cool apps in the medical field (Modality and MIMvista) were showcased, but neither of the companies that developed them appeared to have entry-level jobs; however, Epocrates is a company that was featured at the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and is also putting the iPhone into use in the practice of medicine.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
California,
medicine,
operations,
quality assurance,
software development
by Willy Franzen on March 2, 2008

It’s sad, but it seems safe to say that almost everyone knows someone who has been victimized by cancer. The good news is that constantly advancing medical knowledge brings us ever closer to winning the battle with all cancers. By combining medical know-how with a focus on people and the psychiatric effects of cancer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has put itself at the forefront of the battle for almost 125 years. Whether you’re an aspiring doctor, looking to work in the healthcare industry, or have a personal vendetta against cancer, Sloan-Kettering has jobs that will help you pursue your passion.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
medicine,
New York,
non-profit,
research
by Willy Franzen on February 27, 2008

Surgery takes practice. You can’t jump elbows deep into someone’s chest cavity and reroute traffic without having perfected the motor skills, knowledge, and composure required to do so. The problem is that practicing surgery is tricky. You need to do it on a living, breathing thing for it to be realistic. There aren’t too many people who are jumping at the opportunity to be cut up by aspiring surgeons, so that leaves only one viable option. Sadly, animals are used as proxies for human patients. Anyone would agree that this is an undesirable outcome, but there has been no other way to teach life saving procedures and develop new surgical techniques. The good news is that Sarasota, FL based Animal Replacement Technologies has created a brilliant solution.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
all employers,
biology,
biotechnology,
engineering,
Florida,
medicine