Welcome to Getting Your Foot in the Door or GYFD for short, the latest addition to MEW’s regular sections.

It all started at the EMWA 2015 autumn meeting in The Hague. Derek Ho met up with the EMWA Executive Committee (EC) to talk about his idea of organising an activity aimed to connect potential interns with companies offering medical writing intern - ships. At the same time, Danae Rokanas also contacted Phil Leventhal about her interest in a similar endeavour. The EC pledged support to this initiative and Derek and Danae, together with EMWA PR Officer Beatrix Doerr and Harald Meier got the ball rolling. Six months later, the first Live Internship Forum (IF) was held at the EMWA 2016 Spring Conference in Munich. Seven com - panies participated and a total of 50 intern applicants were present at the IF live event. Hats off to the IF team for pulling off this amazing feat in such a short period of time.

The event was a resounding success with very positive feedback from all parties involved. The IF was complemented by Helen Baldwin’s regular not-for-credit short seminar ‘Introduction to Medical Writing’ and another ‘first’ – Phil Leventhal’s short seminar entitled ‘Getting Your Foot in the Door: How to Build Experience to Get a First Medical Writing Job’. The latter provided tips on how to get into the field without previous industry experience.

Job opportunities for new writers are scarce as Elsa Lewis laments in her article ‘Where have all the UK entry level pharma ceutical regulatory medical writing jobs gone?’ on p. 50. The IF and the other EMWA offerings are witness to our organisation’s commitment to help grow the medical writing field by engaging new graduates and bringing together entry level candidates and the industry. And EMWA will continue to do so through different platforms.

One such platform is this section in the MEW dedicated to this endeavour start ing in September 2016, aptly adopting Phil’s seminar title to be this section’s name. Phil will continue to present GYFD in upcoming EMWA conferences and to complement this MedComms-focused presentation, another short seminar for newbies is planned, entitled from ‘From academia to regulatory medical writing’. However, most important of all, the IF will again be held at the 2017 Spring meeting in Birmingham, this time with a half day time slot dedicated to the forum.

In this maiden edition of GYFD, we would like to thank the Costello Medical team, Debbie Nixon and Sophie Pearson, for their insightful piece on the practical aspects of running a medical writing internship programme. In the upcoming issues, we will be covering internship from different perspectives.

Raquel