Katrina Tao-Muhammad

I have had many teaching jobs of elementary, high school and adult education. I have also worked in several education administration positions. Most recently, I worked 9 years with Sanofi Aventis pharmaceutical company. I received promotions and new work assignments over the course of my career. This included working in 4 different states and selling in every pharmacological division except oncology. At the height of my career, I won a National Sales Award while selling Lantus/Apidra for diabetics. This position allowed me to call on internists and specialists. I have called on many orthopedists, podiatrists, endocrinologists, cardiologists and other specialists. I enjoyed my time with Sanofi Aventis but wanted to extend my career in medical sales. I have also worked outside sales positions and achieved successful sales results during my time with those companies.

I was interested in medical sales because I believe the central focus of medical sales is helping people have the best medical outcome they can achieve for whatever they are struggling with. I enjoyed doing in services with my doctors and their staff, speaker dinner programs and webinars, and one on one talks and meetings with my doctors and their PA?s and NP?s to help provide additional solutions that may work better for some of their patients. I believe my teaching background combined with my sales background was the perfect combination for a position in medical sales. I felt like the work I was doing was value added and important. I felt like the work I did while a medical sales rep in pharma was important and helped the doctors and their patients. Simply put, I enjoyed going to work every day. I believed the products were important and my service to the offices in my territory was very important.

I had heard about MSC years ago while a sales rep with Sanofi. I made a mental note to myself to look into MSC. Finally, I saw an internet ad while searching for med sales jobs and decided to go to the MSC website and learn more. I really liked what I saw, and did additional research online about medical device sales jobs.

I decided it was the right time. I knew to pursue this goal I would have to walk away from my life in Michigan and completely devote all my time and energy into the program in order to complete it successfully. The closest campus was Chicago, which meant I would have to move. So, a lot of planning went into this decision and execution. I also wanted to educated myself on products and pathologies regardless if I could get a job in the industry or not.

Overall the instructors were all great even though they had different teaching styles and classroom management skills.

I believe someone should attend MSC for the valuable training on anatomy, pathology of bone disease and injury, training on various surgical options, and training on device equipment and instrumentation. Also, MSC has a very well known name and reputation in the industry. I will be recommending others to take these classes. I can?t imagine getting into this industry without the MSC training and feeling confident in my job and assisting customers.

I didn?t try to secure a job in the industry, I only decided to first train myself then seek employment. I?m glad I did that in that order.

I stayed late after class daily to get my study time in and complete the homework if given right away. It makes sense because I live in the suburbs and the amount of time wasted in traffic, I could have gotten some serious studying done. So one day, I met Jim Holland doing interviews here at MSC. I gave him a business card I had designed myself as a student in the MSC program, and which stated which program and my expected graduation date. Later in the day when he was leaving he noticed that I was still in the classroom after everyone else had left. He said it showed him that I was a hard worker and then he decided to interview. The senior sales rep for the Chicago area was also present and interviewed me as well. This interview lasted about 40 minutes. Directly afterwards he asked me to send him my resume and informed me that he wanted to hire me right away before I even completed my course. He also scheduled an interview with Larry the territory manager for the next day. Larry came up to the MSC campus and after speaking with him for about 30 minutes and showing him a presentation that I designed for him he also said that he wanted to hire me immediately. It was great and I was treated well. I really believe everything fell into alignment.

I didn?t enter the industry before receiving training and I?m so glad I didn?t. I?m glad I made the decision to be trained first at MSC. This was an extreme sacrifice and very difficult but I?m glad I did this in this way.

I learned about pathologies and the medical device industry as a whole. I learned about various surgeries and device solutions. My manager was also impressed with the MD Rep Tracker. He liked that it showed him that I had business analytics skills and could research my territory. My manager really liked that I had already profiled Zimmer Biomet products and could speak intelligently about them.