An Interview with Guilmira Propper: Insight into the Corporate Sphere
NAISHA DIDWANIA
The following is a transcription of a conversation with Brown alumna Guilmira Propper and Women in Business Committee Member Naisha Didwania. Propper details her experiences and provides insights and advice for working in the corporate world, having worked as a consultant and Pfizer Some edits were made for the sake of clarity.
Naisha Didwania: Hi! Welcome. Can you introduce yourself and what you do before we start?
Guilmira Propper: My name is Guilmira. I graduated from Brown in 2017. I had double majored in or double concentrated in economics and health and human biology. I graduated from business school last year from Wharton as a part of the healthcare management program, and I interned between my first and second year at Pfizer as a part of the marketing rotational program. I returned this fall, full-time, after graduating from business school. I went to Wharton from 2021 to 2023. But prior to that, I worked in Boston for four years — I did a year in consulting before moving into a strategy and a life sciences and diagnostics tools company. So that's my professional background.
ND: "What's your favorite or least favorite part about working as a marketing manager at Pfizer? How does it compare to what you were doing prior to grad school?"
GP: I mean, on a personal level, I think my favorite part about this job is the number of women in leadership and it's honestly the first corporate or professional experience I've had, where the majority of leadership across the organization is comprised of women. I think that's unique and it has inspired me in a lot of ways because not only are they role models for me in general, but they're able to balance so much in their life — to be able to be working moms and move up the corporate ladder to take on these very influential positions. It keeps me going because I know that there's a path for me forward.
As for my least favorite, that's an interesting question. I do think that because Pfizer is such a large company — this is the biggest company that I've ever worked for — there tends to be a lot of silos across different products from brands. So from business unit to business unit, there's not a ton of cross-pollination and I think that's just a symptom of being in such a large company. So it's a little bit more difficult to navigate and you have to be a real self-starter to be able to grow your network, to figure out what other brands are doing, or what their products are doing and you can't just sit back and let it happen to you.
ND: Because you mentioned you did consulting and I know a lot of readers are very interested in the consulting industry, can we talk about how you started out in the field and how it differs from your current job?
GP: I think that sometimes it's difficult at a liberal arts school, you don't have direct experience modeling or you know, creating decks. So it was a great place for me to start moving from there to my second job at corporate development. Again, the biggest thing was the industry switch. But also, just the structure of my role and how projects were presented to me and it wasn't like a staffing sort of thing. It was more like a small knit group that worked on a lot of different things, but everyone worked together across like six or seven people.
I think one of the coolest things about that job was the visibility. It was a pretty big company, and by the nature of our group meant that we had to be in pretty constant communication with the CEO, the CFO, the CFO, etc. And I was a young woman just starting off. At that time, getting access to prominent leaders at the company was really cool and really important.
I think the biggest switch aside from the industry was just the lifestyle I went from. Consulting is not the best work-life balance and I think it tends to be…I mean, every company is different. I was working crazy hours and then suddenly I had a more like normal schedule, I guess. And that work-life balance, I realized was very important to me.
I think I realized how much I was sacrificing in terms of my personal mental and physical health working in consulting and not that that's a bad thing. But for me, I wasn't the best version of myself and I kind of realized that. And so that was one of the considerations when going to business school and post-grad is that, I wanted to make sure that I maintained that and whatever job I took after business school. So that was one of the reasons why I did this one at Pfizer. There are a lot of reasons but one of them was that like, you know, there, you get that balance.
ND: What does a normal day on the job look like?
GP: In my typical day, it's pretty consistently scheduled; I tend to work roughly from 9:00am-6:00pm. You can work more if you want to, and sometimes there are those situations presented to you as “life or death” kind of situations where you need to stay up all night to do something. But it’s really never really life or death.
Where I work, it really is a kind of self-starter culture. You get a lot of autonomy and you can advocate for yourself and fit in your non-negotiables. For example, I need to go to the gym every day.
Something interesting about my job too is the constant change in role. As a part of the marketing rotational program, my job changes every six months because I'm going from brand to brand and types of like, we'll give you a very diverse array of experiences and projects.