The Bob Kays Internship Experience: Part 1

Hello and welcome to the Bob Kays Internship Experience. Get ready to be wisped away for a crazy ride filled with gigantic excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and an ungodly amount of leg/butt cramps from sitting and staring at a computer all day......well if you haven’t immediately closed your web browser after reading that exciting introduction, I can tell you really want to learn about the MBA internship experience (or facebook is broken and you need to kill time somewhere else).

I should probably start by telling you a little bit about myself. My name is Bob Kays and I will be a second year student in the fulltime program at the GSM. I am currently doing my internship at Applied Biosystems ,which recently merged (or was acquired by, depends who you talk to) Invitrogen to form the conglomerate biotech corporation Life Technologies (Yea, we got a lot of websites).

Life Technologies is a global biotechnology tools company providing premier systems, consumables, and services for scientific researchers around the world. Applied Biosystems (the legacy company I work for) is essentially the premier company for all tools related to DNA sequencing and DNA analysis which is used in lots of different applications: from clinical testing (AB currently creates the assay used to determine if someone has the swine flu) to basic researchers in Universities/Medical Schools studying diseases to forensic scientist who use the tools to put away criminals and make the world a safer place to live. Sooooooo basically, by working here, I consider myself a superhero. Well maybe not, but if you want to get some DNA sequenced, I have got some mad hookups.

I am actually very excited to be working for the company. My undergraduate degree is in Genetics and I worked in medical and genetic research for over 5 years before I entered the UC Davis MBA program. During my research, I was actually a customer of Applied Biosystems. So to now be able to work in a business role for the company was a great fit. My title is an “Associate Product Manager” and this was perfect for me as my career aspirations are product management in biotech. I am very interested in product management because the position requires business skills, but also a detailed scientific/technical understanding of the products and technologies in the company. This is a great fit for me because I will be able to utilize the business skills I am learning at the GSM with the scientific background I gained while in my past work in research. So far, the internship has been awesome and has exposed me to lots of different projects a product manager undertakes. Currently, I am working on 3 different projects:

1) New Product Development - Early phases of a new product development project which required me to write a full business plan and assess the new product’s strategic and financial fit with the company.

2) Product Portfolio Management - A portfolio management project which required me to assess an entire product line in Life Technologies and make recommendations to increase profitability.

3) Market Research - Develop a market research survey to better understand customer perceptions regarding a new product soon to be launched.

So this was my introduction (and my first ever blog post so be gentle). I will try to follow up soon with some more details and specifics about my work here (so try to be patient, I know the anticipation of my next post might be too much to handle haha).