Business in Biotechnology
During the summer of 2012, I participated in a study abroad program at Justus-Liebig Universität in Gießen, Germany that featured an
overview of the research and development (R&D) process in all its forms: scientific, economic, and legal. It
was an international program in which the 30 participants hailed from 19 different countries, including India, Portugal, South Korea, Kazakhstan, and Argentina. My family was apprehensive about the program at first, since this was my first international trip completely on my own and the only communication I had with the German university were faceless emails. It took some convincing to get their full backing, but they ultimately supported me. I had a copy of "The Giving Tree" delivered to my parents' house during the first week I was away, and that smoothed over all the ruffled feathers. For me, this journey was invigorating and incredibly liberating. I loved finding all the ins and outs of a new town, a new country, a new continent, and Gießen became a second home for me. One of the biggest ways I began to feel at home was the language study. After an aptitude test, we were categorized and taught a crash course on the German language, which I used at every opportunity.
My primary role in this program was to learn by being immersed in all the different parts of the system. We visited research facilities at Bayer and Merck, toured the European Patent Office, attended lectures from angel investors, doctors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and even a few lawyers. With each lecture, we would be given reading material to prepare beforehand—one in particular was about the classification of stem cells, the patents on them, and their legal uses—listen to the professor speak or pose a question of ethics or politics and mediate debate among the different views. It was amazing to see so many different ways of thinking in motion. To be surrounded by people all around my age, and yet brought up in so many different environments was absolutely amazing. There was always something new and interesting to learn about each other. Even the smallest details like what we ate or how we interacted with our parents was novel to someone in the group. At this point, I was still considering a career in medical research for a pharmaceutical company after I graduated from a doctoral program. Once I was able to see the inner cogs of the system, however, I realized I wanted to pursue a career in the medical field helping people on a consistent, hands-on basis rather than in a lab setting.
My primary role in this program was to learn by being immersed in all the different parts of the system. We visited research facilities at Bayer and Merck, toured the European Patent Office, attended lectures from angel investors, doctors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and even a few lawyers. With each lecture, we would be given reading material to prepare beforehand—one in particular was about the classification of stem cells, the patents on them, and their legal uses—listen to the professor speak or pose a question of ethics or politics and mediate debate among the different views. It was amazing to see so many different ways of thinking in motion. To be surrounded by people all around my age, and yet brought up in so many different environments was absolutely amazing. There was always something new and interesting to learn about each other. Even the smallest details like what we ate or how we interacted with our parents was novel to someone in the group. At this point, I was still considering a career in medical research for a pharmaceutical company after I graduated from a doctoral program. Once I was able to see the inner cogs of the system, however, I realized I wanted to pursue a career in the medical field helping people on a consistent, hands-on basis rather than in a lab setting.