As a young girl watching the evening news in West Africa, Rahinatou Sawadogo saw footage of women dying in childbirth for lack of medical resources.
It made a permanent impression, Sawadogo says. “I said to myself: When I grow up, I’m going into healthcare, to help and take care of women.”
As Sawadogo prepares to graduate from the USC Mann School with a bachelor’s degree in biopharmaceutical sciences and a minor in applied analytics and begin her career at Pfizer, she still carries that early sense of purpose. While she initially intended to become a midwife, she kept an open mind about her education options, took numerous leaps of faith and seized opportunities as they arose.
Born in Burkina Faso, Sawadogo moved to New York when she was 12. She arrived speaking Mooré and French fluently, but only basic English.
“My friends would speak to me, and I knew how to say hello and ask to go to the bathroom, but not much more,” she says.
With the help of her middle school teacher, she caught up quickly while learning to master a new language. By the time she enrolled in the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School in Manhattan, she was excelling on a pre-medical track.
She also became a certified nursing assistant and worked at the New Jewish Home, where she witnessed firsthand how important compassionate care was during the pandemic.
But the college search was incredibly stressful. As a first-generation student raised in a single-parent household, Sawadogo applied only to schools that offered full financial aid. Many rejected her or put her on a waitlist. But USC said yes.
“I stopped at a deli with a friend and opened the email,” she recalls. “I saw the confetti, and I was so happy.”
She arrived at USC as a biology major. She began to reassess her path after the first year, realizing she was more interested in how data and strategy shape healthcare decisions. After consulting with her advisors, she explored other options, including a major in health and human sciences and the Mann School’s biopharmaceutical sciences program.
“My roommate mentioned it, and I hadn’t previously considered pharmacy as a path,” Sawadogo says. “But I thought: That is so cool. Let me try it out.”
She did, and she loved it. In her courses, Sawadogo gained hands-on exposure to industry-grade modeling tools, including advanced software like MongoDB and SimulationPlus. She connected with guest speakers her professors brought to campus — scientists and executives from Pfizer, Novartis, Merck and more.
“Every time I heard something interesting, I was already googling it,” she says. “In this program, we had industry insight before the outside world did. We were talking about GLP-1 drugs before anyone else was.”
Among her professors, none has shaped her thinking more than Associate Professor Hovhannes Gukasyan, whom students call “Dr. Hovik.” Sawadogo credits him with making complex pharmaceutical concepts accessible and modeling what a career bridging academia and industry can look like — an intersection that Sawadogo was deeply interested in.
“He deserves the title of best professor at USC,” she says. “He’s so knowledgeable, so smart, and so supportive.”
“Rahina was one of my star students at USC Mann. She was a blessing to have in all my classes,” Gukasyan says. “Through a demanding academic curriculum, she consistently excelled and demonstrated scholastic excellence, ambition, and loyalty to the Trojan Family.”
Sawadogo served as a founding member of Nexus, a USC student organization for peers interested in the intersection of healthcare and business, and added an applied analytics minor to round out her science background. Internships followed: a pharmaceutical research opportunity at Howard University, sexual health advocacy work with the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health, a consulting externship with PwC, and an integrated insight and strategy internship at Pfizer.
“At Pfizer, most of my peers were computer science or business majors, and I was a science major,” she says. “Having that biopharmaceutical background and analytics minor really helped set me apart.”
During her internship, she analyzed promotional trends across the vaccine market, including identifying a significant increase in post-COVID promotional investment, helping teams better understand how shifts in spending influenced performance.
This summer, Sawadogo will join Pfizer’s U.S. Vaccines Strategy Team in New York as a business analytics associate, conducting market analysis and translating data-driven insights into commercial strategy for Pfizer’s U.S. vaccines portfolio.
When she crosses the stage at commencement, Sawadogo says she will be thinking of how far she has come and the people who helped her get there.
“It’s been a journey from Burkina Faso to New York, then to here. I love this community, and I would love to come back to USC and be a guest speaker,” she says. “I want to give back to the place that believed in me and helped shape who I am today.”