CEOs and Compliance

Today I avoided the nasty humidity + 95 degree weather tucked away in Bayer HQ working on a mysterious project entitled "Compliance".  As it turned out, Compliance involved hundreds of pages of reading regarding Bayer's ethical and legal standards. I can now definitively tell you  the circumstances in which you may or may not feed a group of  medical professionals (which, seriously though, is an ethical issue that has bothered me since I put in the hours at that medical records office last summer).

So, yeah, it was a slow day.  But that only made the highlight of the afternoon that much better: meeting Phil Blake, the Bayer U.S. corporate executive (aka President Boss Guy). I was immediately put at ease; he was down-to-earth and soft-spoken, with quite a lovely English accent to boot.  In our brief meeting he related his misadventures going for runs in the area, his mental processes as he oversees the many divisions within Bayer, and his vision for the hemophilia community.  My fellow interns and I surprised him with some recent breakthroughs in hemophilia research and he requested we forward him an article or two.  I left feeling honored to have been able to spend time with such a successful yet humble man. 


With the windows rolled down and NPR turned up, we whipped back to our hotel.  After a week of intensive communication, conflict management and presentation skills training I'm looking forward to a weekend in The City That Never Sleeps.

West Orange and the Lab of Mr. Edison

My fellow intern Amanda and I spent our first full day in West Orange hiking to and from the lab site of none other than Thomas Edison himself.  I both loved and was horrified by the tour of his chemical lab--safety standards were nonexistent! My favorite part though had to be seeing the elderly couples nodding their heads in gentle remembrance as old tunes blared from the demonstrator's phonograph. 

West Orange is beautiful; its lush green hills and old brick neighborhoods  resemble West Virginia's, although with a dash of South American flavor.  We passed around five Peruvian restaurants on our three mile walk alone!

On the way back I caught sight of the peak of this cathedral.  Amanda humored me and we hunted it down.  I'm a sucker for Gothic architecture; I think the only thing that could have made me happier is if I had been allowed up into the tower.

We wrapped up the day with some shopping at Whole Foods Market, dessert with the internship director's family and some relaxing in the hot tub.  Looking forward to my first day on the job tomorrow!