Our research brings a data-driven approach to the recruiting process of the three companies that brought us the COVID vaccines. From this, we can understand which programs and colleges bring students the best chance at getting into the research labs of these three companies. First, it is worth noting our sample size of researchers: Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson have similar numbers of people on their research teams (14,643 and 13,261, respectively). Meanwhile, despite its status as a darling of Wall Street and the scientific startup community, Moderna’s sample size of 1,137 is less than one-tenth of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson’s research departments. This will inevitably skew how the data may look but not necessarily the story the data is telling. Rutgers has the highest total number of graduates working for Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, with 482 graduates working as researchers. Of these graduates, 325 are working at Johnson & Johnson alone. Rutgers is followed by Penn State (363), then Belgium’s KU Leuven (325), and the University of Connecticut (270). The University of Connecticut has the largest share of graduates at Pfizer, with 216 graduates working as researchers there. Despite having less than a tenth of its competitors’ research department size, Moderna is still present at most of these Top 10 schools for overall research-related graduates working at one of these three firms. In fact, the only schools that send no graduates to Moderna are the two Belgian schools on the list, KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. While Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson both recruit talent from these two schools, it is clear that Johnson & Johnson is the company more interested in some of Belgium’s top research talent. Moderna is an outlier in another way: only one of the top five universities it recruits from, Northeastern, appears in the overall Top 10. This suggests that Moderna’s recruitment pipeline is largely separate from those of other pharmaceutical companies. In contrast, all of Johnson & Johnson’s top five feeder schools appear on the list. Pfizer falls somewhere in the middle of these extremes. While it gets a large proportion of its researchers from UConn and Rutgers, there are other schools it draws heavily from that are not in the overall Top 10, as the next section shows.