Through Project OnRamp, Tufts undergraduates gain paid internships, mentorship, and early access to biotech and research careers
As a School of Engineering student, Jed Quiaoit (shown here, in the olive shirt, with fellow Pfizer interns in 2023) secured two summer internships, working alongside scientists and operations teams to get firsthand exposure to how drugs are brought to market.
During her first week as an intern at a biopharmaceutical company, Brianna Starling recorded raw data in a lab. Though she was newly at the organization, she was already performing an essential first step in the process of ensuring that new equipment would be ready for use in drug development.
At the time, Starling, A24, E25, was a biomedical engineering major preparing for her senior year at Tufts. She had built technical expertise during her time in the university’s academic labs, but this was her first experience with an industry-based process that would lead to real-world results. “The stakes felt high,” she says. “I started to understand how my academic training could fit into a much larger process.”
For his part, during the summers after his freshman and sophomore years, Jed Quiaoit, E25, had come to a realization not about how the biotech industry works but about what career paths it offers. “Coming into Tufts, I knew that I wanted to do something in the field, but I had no idea what,” he says. “I didn’t know what was possible until my first internship.”
And in the summer before her senior year at Tufts, Oluchi Ezekwenna, A23, G24, used her internship at a small biotech company to rethink plans she had long taken for granted. “Before my internship, everything I did was tailored toward going to med school,” she says. “After that summer, I started seeing research and industry as my path forward.”
A common thread for these Tufts graduates? All three credit Project OnRamp with shaping their early careers.
A national initiative created to expand access to paid internships in the life sciences for under-resourced and often first-generation students, Project OnRamp has been designed to address long-standing gaps in who gets exposure to biotech, pharmaceutical, and related fields.
Brianna Starling said that her internship "helped [her] understand how things really work—how to communicate, how to carry [herself], how to be professional in different spaces. It made everything that came after possible.”
Central to the model is its partnership with employers, who agree to reserve a set number of paid summer internships exclusively for Project OnRamp students. The roles are not posted publicly or filled through internal referrals. Instead, companies commit to hiring from a curated pool of candidates, ensuring that students compete on equal footing with peers who share similar financial and educational backgrounds.
At Tufts, Project OnRamp collaborates closely with the Career Center, which helps identify eligible students and supports them throughout the internship process. Working alongside Project OnRamp staff, Sue Atkins, associate director of employer relations in the Tufts Career Center, and career advisors assist with the review of resumes and cover letters for roles aligned to their interests and experience, while also connecting them to workshops and other career-related resources. Students then apply and interview for roles, with employers making the final candidate selections before the internships begin in the summer.
Learning the Language of Industry
Through the program, Starling secured an internship at a Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company, where she rotated among teams, shadowed colleagues, and learned new techniques. “I helped out wherever I could,” she says. “If there was something I could learn, I gave it a shot.”
As Starling gained experience, Project OnRamp supported her with workshops on professional communication, workplace expectations, and career planning, while the Tufts Career Center helped her strengthen her résumé and prepare for interviews. “Everything I learned during the internship set me up to apply for jobs in the real world,” she says.
That preparation proved effective. After graduating and completing Tufts’ fifth-year master’s program, Starling moved directly into a role in the pharmaceutical industry.
“I would not have had the confidence to launch my career if it hadn’t been for Project OnRamp,” she says. “It taught me how to show up in the workforce.”
When Quiaoit arrived at Tufts, he knew he was interested in biotechnology but had little sense of how to turn that interest into a career. Project OnRamp offered a clear starting point.
Through the program, Quiaoit secured two summer internships—first at the Cambridge-based biotech company Obsidian Therapeutics, then at Pfizer—where he worked alongside scientists and operations teams and gained firsthand exposure to how drugs are brought to market.
“I learned that research is just one piece of it,” he says. “There’s regulation, project management, writing, data science—so many other paths within the field.”
This broader view, combined with daily experience on professional teams, helped Quiaoit make more intentional choices about his future, as did mentorship he received while working.
“By the time I graduated, I no longer felt like an outsider trying to break in,” he says. “I had a kind of professional identity already. I knew what I was good at, and I knew where I wanted to go.”
Rethinking the Future
For Ezekwenna, joining Project OnRamp didn’t solidify an existing plan; it opened up a new pathway.
After having spent much of her time at Tufts preparing for medical school, in order to also explore research and industry, she pursued an internship at a biotech company focused on immunotherapy and cancer research. “I wanted to understand what I might be able to do outside of practicing medicine,” she says.
“I never would have considered the path I’m on if it hadn’t been for my conversations with the people I met during my internship,” says Oluchi Ezekwenna.
That internship helped her develop advanced laboratory techniques, such as culturing cells, running polymerase chain reaction analyses, and characterizing proteins—methods she later applied in her graduate research. That work, in turn, led to a published paper based on her master’s degree project.
“The paper was a culmination of everything I learned during my internship,” Ezekwenna says. “The work I did there enabled me to propose new experiments that I then wrote about. It also gave me a mentor I stayed in touch with, who supported me a lot during my graduate studies.”
Encouragement from that mentor and others during the internship also led Ezekwenna to consider doctoral study. Today, as she applies to Ph.D. programs, she works in a research role at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, continuing the kind of work she first encountered through Project OnRamp.
“I never would have considered the path I’m on if it hadn’t been for my conversations with the people I met during my internship,” says Ezekwenna.
Taken together, the experiences of Starling, Quiaoit, and Ezekwenna illustrate how Project OnRamp translates access into early-career momentum. Through paid industry placements paired with sustained mentoring and campus support, the program helps students build both technical competence and an understanding of how scientific workplaces function.
Starling sums it up this way: “It helped me understand how things really work—how to communicate, how to carry myself, how to be professional in different spaces,” she says. “It made everything that came after possible.”
