No setback comes without a blessing

Like many things in the professional world, I got to know more about medical writing and see it as the next step in my professional life, thanks to a connection. A friend of a friend was a native Spanish speaker living in Munich, Germany, with a PhD in Biomedicine, just like me. But while I was still looking for opportunities outside academia, he was already working in a pharmaceutical company as a medical writer. He told me about EMWA and how he landed his first job as a medical writer after attending his first EMWA conference. When he described what medical writing was, I strongly felt that this was a path for me too, because the writing was what I most enjoyed during my PhD. After talking to him, I decided to become an EMWA member and attend the spring conference in Prague in 2020 with my husband and my one-year-old son. Then COVID-19 came, and life paused for all: both the spring and autumn conferences were cancelled, my son stopped going to daycare, and I put on hold all my professional plans. But an EMWA e-mail in October, announcing the first online EMWA conference, rekindled both my earlier interest in medical writing and my hopes for starting a new professional chapter the following year.