The Bob Kays Internship Experience: Part 4

So I thought I'd give a little background about some of the things I have done outside of just the internship projects.

Networking

When I started, my boss told me one of the best things an intern can do is to meet as many different people in the company as possible. She was nice enough to give me a list of about 10-15 contacts and suggested I should try to meet one on one with them to learn about their background and talk about their position at the company. This was great because although I was in product management, I was able to speak with people in different areas of the busisness, such as business development, market development as well as some specific application scientists. This gave a good perspective on the company and to get into certain positions. This week, I also met with the division manager, which is pretty cool because he is a pretty big guy in the company. He was very nice and actually had a similar background to myself (worked in biological R&D and then got an MBA to move into business). He also gave me some great career advice and told me to keep him as a contact for the future, hopefully he can hire me or help me get a job :)


Intern Program Activities

Life Technologies has about 30 interns (see picutre below) working this Summer at the Foster City Applied Biosystems site and every week we usually have some sort of internship program event. Some events were really interesting (at our kickoff we got to meet the CEO of the company and at the other event, we got to hear from the President of the Applied Markets Division talk about Applied Biosystems' work with forensic science and crime labs. However, some were not the most helpful (for me, the resume building event was not so helpful, as I have already had hours of very similar events at the GSM).

Probably the best event of the Summer was when we went to a San Francisco Giants game (see the picture below). We went to a day game, so not only did I get free baseball tickets, but they also paid me to go watch baseball and drink beer (AWESOME!!). The game ended pretty quickly as well so after the game we went down Embarcadero to some happy hours after the long hard day of work.