In Biotech, Your Hands Are Your Resume.

In partnership with

You Don't Have to Guess When, Only Which Way

That's a perp. No expiry, no rollover fees, no options complexity. Just a straight trade on direction, held as long as you want it. $90T trades on this market offshore every year. Kalshi just made it the first legal, CFTC-regulated version in the US.

Check out Kalshi Perps

_{Using leverage increases risk of loss. Leverage is subject to the Firm's review and the customer's risk profile.}

Welcome to today's SCALIS EarlyCareers newsletter! 🚀

You are a biology or biochem major with a strong transcript, and you cannot understand why your applications to Genentech, Amgen, and Moderna are vanishing. You did everything the general job-search advice told you to. You wrote the coursework bullets. You mirrored the keywords. You still got nothing.

Here is what the advice missed. Biotech does not hire on the same currency as consulting or marketing. In those verticals, a smart generalist with a clean transcript is a legitimate candidate. In biotech, the first filter is not who you are or what you studied. It is what you can physically do at a bench or in a terminal, described in a specific vocabulary that a screener recognizes on sight. "Took molecular biology" is a class. "Ran CRISPR knockouts and validated by Western blot" is a capability. Only one of those clears the filter.

And the place you acquire real capability is almost never a classroom. It is a research lab, which in biotech does double duty no other vertical has: it is both the credential that gets you past the resume gate and the channel that quietly feeds you into industry. This is also the vertical shifting fastest, because AI drug discovery has split the entry path into two very different tracks. Today is about picking your track, building the credential, and finding the channels biotech actually recruits through.

Short BTC. Long ETH. Hold as Long as You Want.

Kalshi is the first CFTC-regulated perps market in the US. No expiry, no rollover, up to 5.8x leverage on BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and more. Trade price direction without touching the asset.

Try Kalshi Perpetuals Today

_{Using leverage increases risk of loss. Leverage is subject to the Firm's review and the customer's risk profile.}

3,335 new internship positions freshly posted today. View the full list below and start applying!

Your technique list is the real filter, so name techniques, not classes

Open any biotech or pharma internship posting and read the qualifications literally. They do not ask for "coursework in genetics." They ask for hands-on experience with specific methods: PCR, ELISA, cell culture, flow cytometry, Western blot, CRISPR on the wet side, and Python, R, sequence alignment, single-cell analysis, and machine learning on the computational side. Those exact terms are what the automated screen and the hiring scientist are both looking for.

So build a dedicated Technical Skills block near the top of your resume and fill it with techniques you have genuinely performed, using the industry's own words. Do not bury "isolated RNA and ran qPCR" inside a paragraph about a class project. Pull it out, name the technique, and where you can, name the outcome. A screener scanning fifty resumes is pattern-matching for method vocabulary. Give them the pattern.

One warning. Never list a technique you cannot walk through at a bench or on a whiteboard. "You listed flow cytometry, walk me through your gating strategy" is a normal biotech interview question, and a bluff dies instantly in that room.

The lab is the credential you cannot fake, so get into one now

Every technique above comes from somewhere, and for a student that somewhere is an undergraduate research lab. This is the highest-leverage move available to you, and it is why "get research experience" is not soft advice in biotech. It is the literal prerequisite that generates everything on the resume above.

You do not wait to be recruited into a lab. You go get in. Identify three to five professors whose work you can describe, read one recent paper from each, and email them directly with a short, specific message: what you read, why it interests you, and that you want to contribute for a semester. Most students never send this email, which is exactly why it works. A single semester of real bench or computational work converts you from "biology major" to "candidate with technique," and it often comes with a PI who will make a call on your behalf.

Pick your fork: wet lab or computational, because they are different jobs

Here is the 2026 shift nobody told you about. Biotech used to mean the bench almost by default. It does not anymore. AI drug discovery, genomics, and single-cell work have made computational biology a massive and fast-growing intern track, and companies like Genentech, Amgen, Illumina, and Moderna now hire undergraduates to build data pipelines and AI tools that scientists use in production.

These are genuinely different jobs with different credentials. The wet-lab track wants your hands: assay development, experimental design, the technique list above. The computational track wants code and statistics: Python and R, working with sequencing data, some machine learning, and crucially it is open to CS, stats, and quantitative students, not only biology majors. You do not need a PhD for an undergraduate comp-bio internship, and often not even a biology major, which is the best-kept secret in the sector right now.

Decide which fork you are running before you apply, because it changes your resume, your target companies, and which classes and lab you should be chasing this semester. A muddled "I like both" application reads as no signal at all.

Stop searching Handshake and go where biotech actually posts

Biotech recruiting runs on channels most students never touch, and the general platforms miss huge swaths of it. Some state-funded programs explicitly tell you not to apply through Handshake at all.

Work the real channels instead. Big pharma and large biotech post structured programs under the "Early Careers" or "Students and Graduates" sections of their own career sites, not aggregators. Life-science boards like BioSpace list far more roles than general platforms, and its hotbed maps show where the industry actually clusters. There are life-science career fairs built specifically for the sector, and several states run subsidized life-sciences internship programs. These are lower-competition doors that biology majors walk past while refreshing the same three general sites everyone else uses.

Startups will not post the job, so you have to knock

A large share of biotech happens at small, venture-backed startups, and most will never publish an internship listing anywhere. Ten- and fifty-person companies do not run structured early-careers programs. They hire when a specific pair of hands would help, and they hire the student already on their radar.

That means the startup path is direct outreach, not application. Find early-stage companies in your subfield through BioSpace and venture-firm portfolio pages, then reach out to a founder or early scientist with a concrete offer. Startup interns get far more hands-on range than one of forty interns at a big pharma, and the technique list you build there is often broader.

$90 Trillion in Offshore Perps. Now They're in the US.

Traders have been going long and short on crypto for years — offshore, unregulated. Kalshi fixed that. First CFTC-regulated perps in the US. BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and more. Up to 5.8x leverage.

Try Kalshi Perpetuals Today

_{Using leverage increases risk of loss. Leverage is subject to the Firm's review and the customer's risk profile.}

The email that gets you into a lab

The whole strategy above hinges on one message most students are too intimidated to send. Here is a version you can adapt and send this week. Keep it short. Professors get long, vague emails constantly and delete them.

Notice what it does. It proves you read actual work, it asks for the smallest possible yes, and it signals you want technique, not a resume line. That is the message that opens the one door biotech runs through.