I've done a few weeks of searching, (thank you all for the informative posts on this forum!!,) and I still had a few questions I want to double check on.

A brief background: I am a Pharmacy student in Costa Rica, US citizen. Once graduated I will hold the equivalent of a Msc. in the European system (300 ects credits.)

My wife and I are starting some high German classes around the beginning of 2015. We will have three years of German under our belts, and we are already bilingual in Spanish / English. (C1 English and Spanish.) We can converse with Italian speakers fairly well. I hate French. Not the French, just their language. I can read it fairly well, but it's unintelligible to me audibly.

What can we do to make ourselves more marketable to the Pharma industry in Switzerland? Ideally we would prefer to go straight to Switzerland and get some experience in the industry. If that is an improbability we will be moving to Spain to obtain Phd's in Industrial Pharmacy and EU citizenship. Still, that's two to three years I'd rather spend in Switzerland if possible. (Citizenship in two years is a possibility for us because I have a retirement already from my service in the military which allows us to apply for a permanent residency. After this my wife, who is a natural citizen of Iberoamericana, is entitled to naturalize after two years of said permanent residency. With a marriage certificate proving at least one year of preexisting marriage to a Spanish citizen, I can get citizenship as well. Essentially giving us citizenship at the same time.)

Currently, it appears that we may be able to volunteer at a local non-profit biological research laboratory, but that's not directly related to chemistry so I was unsure if it would be useful. I have yet to find volunteer opportunities outside of the research laboratories in the local Universities that are more chemistry related.

To finish our degree we will be required to do a 300 hour internship in either a hospital or industrial research lab. Considering the only research labs I know of here are Novartis, GSK, and a few local companies that compound generics, I've considered going that route to try to beef up the resume.

Can you think of anything else I'm missing that would help make us competitive? I'm a bit of a planner; must be the old soldier in me.

There are no summer breaks in this country; three semesters a year. Yet, we are able to take time off if we like. Would it be worth applying for an internship experience with one of the big Pharma companies before we graduate? What would be a good year to do so, after the Bachelors and before the Masters, or perhaps the last year of the Bachelors?

Thanks to all, and I apologize if I failed to find the answers to these questions, were said answers to have previously been posted elsewhere.