CancerFree Biotech is a biotechnology startup with operations in Taipei and New York, focused on cancer drug testing and personalized treatment solutions.
Through Taipei’s Youth Overseas Internship Program, Jolene and Joanna joined CancerFree and worked across marketing, business development, content, data, and project execution. Their experience reflects one of the program’s core goals: giving young people the opportunity not only to observe an international workplace, but to take part in real projects, contribute to a team, and discover new possibilities for their own careers.
Exploring a New Industry from the Inside
For Jolene, healthcare was never an obvious career path.
With a background in international politics and marketing, most of her previous experience had been market-facing. Before joining CancerFree, biotechnology and healthcare were largely unfamiliar territory.
During the internship, however, her work expanded from marketing into business development, market analysis, brand communications, and project execution. She contributed to projects including BioAsia 2025 and preparations for the Taiwan Expo in Dallas, while also working on one-pagers, newsletters, and educational materials.
After expressing an interest in sales, Jolene was also given the opportunity to accompany the team on a hospital visit. Seeing how the company communicated with physicians helped her understand more clearly how a healthcare technology moves beyond research and into real-world application.
What had once felt like a distant industry gradually became something she could understand—and perhaps even see herself becoming part of.
“I had never imagined myself entering the healthcare industry before. Now I know it is a path I could choose.”
Turning Skills into Real Contributions
Joanna’s experience took a different path.
Her work included podcast development, SEO articles, social media content, physician-facing materials, design, and data workflows. Working with specialized medical information also meant learning how to understand complex material and turn it into clear, accessible content for different audiences.
One of her projects involved improving the workflow for social media data. For Joanna, this was an important shift: her work was no longer simply something to complete and submit. It became part of how a real team operated.
That experience also changed the way she viewed her own background. Rather than seeing herself only through the lens of a humanities or marketing education, she began to recognize how content, data, design, and communication could work together to solve practical problems.
It gave her a clearer sense of the kind of cross-disciplinary work she hopes to pursue in the future.
Learning Beyond the Workplace
Living and working in New York added another dimension to the experience.
Joanna became more attentive to how transportation, museums, cultural spaces, and community activities shape everyday life. Jolene, meanwhile, described New York as both “real and dreamlike”—a city defined by ambition and opportunity, but also by high living costs and the constant effort of finding one’s place.
Rather than experiencing the city only as visitors, both began to look more closely at how people live, work, and interact in a different urban environment.
These observations also gave them a new perspective on Taipei. The value of going abroad was not simply seeing what another city does differently, but returning with new questions about work, industries, cities, and their own place within them.
Creating Value for Both Interns and Host Organizations
For Jolene and Joanna, the internship was an opportunity to test their abilities in a real workplace, explore an unfamiliar industry, and gain a clearer understanding of their own strengths and future possibilities.
For CancerFree, the interns were not simply observers. They contributed to content development, market research, project execution, data workflows, brand communications, and business development, bringing different academic backgrounds and perspectives into the team.
This two-way exchange is at the heart of Taipei’s Youth Overseas Internship Program.
The program is designed not only to help Taipei’s young people gain international experience, but to place them in environments where they can contribute, learn through real responsibilities, and build the confidence to work across cultures and disciplines.
At the same time, international host organizations gain access to motivated young talent from Taipei, along with new ideas, skills, and perspectives that can add value to their work.
For Jolene and Joanna, the experience did not provide every answer about what comes next. But it did something equally important: it made new possibilities visible.
A meaningful internship does not always tell young people exactly where to go next. Sometimes, its greatest value is helping them see a path they had never imagined before.