October 12, 2022, by Mei Kee Lee

Student Sharing: My Industrial Internship Experience at Duopharma (Bangi) – Hua Chai Xian

Article written by Hua Chai Xian, BSc (Hons) Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences graduate, Class of 2022. He has worked as an intern under Production Department at Duopharma Manufacturing (Bangi) Sdn. Bhd. for three months while waiting for his graduation certificate this year.

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Getting the Internship Opportunity

I get to know this opportunity from the Summer Internship Providers email that was sent by Dr. Lee Mei Kee to MPharm and Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences (PHS) students before summer break. At first, during receiving the call that I was offered to work as under Production department, I was overjoyed that I even bought my besties a drink. However, my main concern was that Duopharma did not inform much about the job scope in which I will be going to do under Production department. Despite the worries, I still decided to accept the offer, thinking that it is a rare opportunity, and my decision had never made me regretted later on.

My Daily Tasks under Production Department

Entrance of Duopharma Manufacturing (Bangi) Sdn. Bhd.

I was assigned to a data analyst to help out his daily tasks such as data collection, and interpretation. During my first two weeks over there, I was asked to basically study a whole new thing which is more statistics related rather than pharmaceutical. However, I would not say that it is completely irrelevant to what I had learnt back at UNM. PHS courses had aided in my understanding and allowed me to absorb the new knowledge in such a short period of time. It is called Process Capability Analysis, which serves to assess the quality of product through finding out how well the manufacturing process meets a set of specification limits. In short, I was responsible to assist my supervisor in collecting necessary data from BMR every day, usually critical quality attributes (e.g., assay, average weight of tablets, hardness of tablets, and packing yield), and analysing them using relevant statistic method. Finally, for each product, we compiled them as a summary, known as Product Quality Review, which would be presented to superiors and stakeholders on an annual basis.

Intern’s Life at Duopharma

I have met and known a lot of good people, like interns, prodigies, and our alumni. They not only come from UNM, but also from other great universities, such as USM, SEGi, and UTM. Working with them together is definitely happy and unforgettable.

Experiences and Insights

I would say that my co-workers at Duopharma are amiable and super nice! They indeed took care of the interns and are willing to hear us out. Despite being overwhelmed with responsibilities, they managed to free up some time for us to so-called ‘have a tour’, which is my favourite of all time during my internship period. They brought us around and also to each production line, such as bottle line, packing line, galenical and so forth. During the tours, they explained each part of the line in detail for our understanding and learning. It was my utmost pleasure to evidence each detailed production in large scale with my naked eyes, starting from dispensary to packing, in which I had only been learning from reading textbooks. Herein, I would like to express my gratitude to my co-workers, who had made my internship wonderful. Thank you very much!

Posted in Experience SharingInternshipPHSUndergraduate