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[30.11.2007]
Hey All!

Sad but true – it’s all over now! Today is my last day and this will be the last document I am generating on this computer.

Yesterday I had my final presentation in front of senior management and round about 15 people. And what can I say – it really worked out even better than I could have imagined! I received great feedback from my Licensing & Acquisition Team even during the presentation which is of course a really good back up in terms of nervousness. You have to know that these people have been working in the Pharma business for years and years and therefore I have been really glad to be able to give them some new insights. But also the feedback of the others has been really positive. So you can tell that I was and still am pretty happy.

Today I said good-bye to everyone, had lots of coffees and got lots of private mail addresses to keep in touch. I am now heading back to Munich to finish my studies and I am already excited about coming back to start working here. I think this is the most important thing about this internship: I am leaving but I am already looking forward to coming back and I know that this will be possible.

To put it in a nutshell: great internship, great people, great atmosphere and definitely an extremely good place to work in!

I think this is the right closing for the blog. Take care and enjoy your weekend!

Cheers,
Thomas

[23.11.2007]
Hi everybody!

It’s incredible but this has been my last but one week. I will finish my internship by the end of next week and on Thursday will be my final presentation, so no time to rest ;-)

I’m pretty satisfied with this week.

First of all I managed to have three lunches with French or Swiss-French friends to improve my French. Further on a Swiss-French friend of mine, who wants to improve his German, and myself decided to talk to each other one day in German and one day in French – which sometimes is quite funny as you can imagine. Sometimes I’m so puzzled by all the languages that I can’t speak to any one or get confused whether I’m speaking to a French or German colleague…

Second of all I managed to finish the Licensing Deal Valuation Template! All went pretty smoothly and I’m happy to be done with that. Unfortunately I have to do some refinement work on my presentation but I will be done easily until Thursday – at least I hope so ;-)

OK, so far so good for this week. Enjoy your weekend and see you next week!

Cheers,
Thomas …

[16.11.2007]
Hi everyone,

This week was great! I’ve been to Schwalbach to visit the German Headquarters of Procter. I’ve been there for the whole Tuesday speaking to a bunch of people to get an insight in the work they do there. Actually the work is quite different as I realized very fast. It is much closer to the consumer than the work we do here in Geneva (the European Headquarters). After all starting there would definitely be an option that would be worth considering if I should start at Procter after my studies.

Besides that I’m progressing pretty well in my projects so I was even able to help in preparing a meeting with the US senior management for today. I think that also helped my manager who has quite a lot to do at the moment ;-)

Nevertheless I will have to fully focus on my own projects the next week as the final presentation will be soon and meantime I’m already getting a bit nervous ;-)

So far so good for this week.

Enjoy your weekend and see you next week!

Cheers,
Thomas …

[9.11.2007]
Hi everyone,

Again another week passed by incredibly fast. This one was quite cool, as I was able to finish my benchmarking project and I went to Lausanne University to do a recruiting. So on Monday and Tuesday I finished my benchmarking project. I finished information gathering and arranged the presentation slides to make them look good – at least I think so ;-)

Then on Wednesday I went to Lausanne for the whole day. We gave the students a presentation of Procter and of the internship opportunities they have here. Therefore we went there with five “full employees” to briefly present the functions (like Finance, Marketing and so on) and with five interns to give them first hand insights of how an intern’s life is at Procter. The whole day was great fun and I think the students were really interested in us and liked the presentation.

On Thursday I attended an @risk training. @risk is an excel add on tool for Monte Carlo simulations which I’m planning to implement in my following projects. It was quite interesting and impressive at the same time to see what this tool is able to do. So I’m pretty confident that this is going to work out well ;-)

OK, so far so good for this week! Hope to see you again next week.

Cheers,

Thomas …

[2.11.2007]
Hey all,

So this is the way it works out every Friday: I am sitting at work and suddenly an outlook reminders pops up saying “Write your weekly blog!” First I’m puzzled, then I look up my outlook calendar to see if it’s really Friday again – I still really don’t believe it but as techniques says so, it has to be. Then I’m wondering what I did the whole last week.

Most times I’m not sure and therefore look up my calendar again. After starting to remember begin to write and start telling you how fast time passed by this week …

Ok, so according to my calendar I have attended a negotiation training, had some meetings to see some valuation tools and went to French language class on Monday. And indeed, whilst writing these lines memory is coming back ;-) Besides that I mainly worked on my benchmarking presentation and the pharma deal database analysis so that I’m pretty through with those things and what shall I say: it feels great! Finally you can see all the work you’ve done.

The weekend is going to be fun as one of my intern colleagues, Lu, has her birthday on Saturday and on Sunday we (some interns, new hires and some interns from the united nations) will be laser fighting. I haven’t done this so far but it sounds like fun!

So enjoy your weekend and see you next week – if I survive the laser fight ;-)

Cheers,

Thomas…

[26.10.2007]
Hi folks!

Why am I already writing you again? Didn’t I do that just yesterday? However …This week has been really busy. There was an offsite event scheduled for Thursday and Friday and I was supposed to give a presentation of the work I’ve done so far. As I wasn’t prepared for giving a presentation I had to work really late at the beginning of the week. Luckily I got it done in time – just to learn then, that the offsite was cancelled … But maybe it’s not always bad to have some pressure as you are maybe more productive in these times ;-)

Yesterday evening we then had something like an alternative offsite as we had cheese fondue in the middle of the lake. My fellow intern Robin finished his internship today and we therefore had a farewell dinner yesterday. It was quite fun and Robin threatened that we’ll see each other again :-P

I didn’t manage to attend a training this week but I’m confident that I’ll make it next week. Basically this is just the first or second week of my internship without a training.

Quite impressive for an internship, isn’t it?

So much for today, see you next week,

Thomas …

[19.10.2007]
Hi folks!

Finally – after 6 weeks of internship - I have been sent to the printer! And guess what – I screwed up! Incredible, but I really did not make it. One could say that was because the document has been in an American format the printer is not able to print out, but I think I am simply heavily overqualified for those tasks ;-P

Being obviously unable to succeed in those technical things I chose to work on things better fitting my strengths: I did a qualitative analysis of some licensing & acquisition databases and subsequently a quantitative analysis of the Pharma deals since 2000.

Further on I kept working on my benchmarking, of course and visited one lunch and one web based training in addition. Regarding the valuation techniques I had an interesting discussion with my manager about an alternative approach. We did not come to a result yet, but this is going to be interesting.

Again time evaporated incredibly fast. It’s Friday again and I am beginning to get a bit nervous regarding my schedule…

However I’ll keep you updated about all that.

Cheers

Thomas.

[12.10.2007]
Hey all!

Again I’m asking myself, “is it really already Friday? Where has the time gone?”

This week I spent quite a lot of time getting to know different valuation approaches for licensing deals, comparing them and weighing their pros and cons. And of course – maybe most important – trying to visualize them in an easy way for my presentation. It is quite interesting and amazing to see the range of techniques applied across the industry, starting with the absolute basics and ending with really sophisticated ones.

In parallel my manager and I worked through my information gathered so far and set the subsequent tasks I will have to complete. These do mainly contain gathering some more information and visualizing the information gathered so far.

During working on my day-to-day tasks I’m also trying to take my time for some trainings offered here at Procter. Those consist of web based trainings you can complete yourself, lunch trainings which are during lunch time with lunch served and instructor lead courses lasting half a day or longer. That is quite a nice mix of really interesting trainings and I appreciate being allowed to attend them.

So much for this week! Enjoy your weekend and see you next week.

Thomas …

[5.10.2007]
Hey all!

This week went by in a pure rush. I gathered some quite interesting information for my benchmarking and can go now for the refinements of my results. Which is not really too
early as I will have my midphase presentation next week or the week after …

In parallel my manager introduced to me the topical evaluation models used to analyze the deals to give me a first impression what my second project is going to be about. It
sounds quite interesting and promising so I am pretty motivated to start working on this one …

Besides that we had an intern-dinner to welcome the new interns that started the beginning of October. It was quite fun and you should not believe how many Germans there can be on one table which is supposed to be international ;-)

That’s it for today! Have fun and see you soon.

Thomas …

[1.10.2007]
Hi folks,
Back to reality this week! No champagne, no caviar – but pasta and water in the cafeteria.

However, having realized that I did not tell you what I am doing here at all, I will head for this. So I am in the F&A department working in pharmaceuticals, doing Licensing & Acquisition in special. I am currently trying to understand the global licensing environment in order to find out what works well and what does not. So it is basically all about if we are doing well, where we can do better and what we can maybe adopt from others.

As you can see it sounds pretty much like a consultants work: having no idea what it is all about, read some reports and then tell everyone how the things should be done. After having (hopefully) become a licensing-deal-expert (which will approximately last 5 to 7 weeks) I am going to develop a template providing ad-hoc financial analysis of licensing deals.

At the end I will have to present my results to my boss and some of the senior management and cross my fingers that they will learn something new.

That is enough about work I guess, but there is another fantastic thing here in Procter and that is the New Hire and Intern Network. All the New Hires (folks that just started here at Procter) and interns are connected, meeting on and off the work. So it is very easy to get to know a lot of people and start building your network. By the way do you know the definition of networking? Its simple: getting together, having food and drinks, chatting with everyone and – most importantly – having a good time.

Back to more serious stuff. In times of melting polar caps, increasing temperatures and more and more pollution I am delighted by the fact that every employee receives a FREE BUS PASS for Geneva. Regarding some German companies discussing for years whether they are going to pay some percent of the public transport fares for their employees or not this is just great and definitely more than a matter of course.

Well, that’s the closing for today enjoy your weekend and see you soon.
Thomas …

[21.9.2007]
Hi everybody!

First of all, the mandatory boring introduction: I am currently studying Mathematical Finance and Economics in Munich. I have been studying for 6 semesters so far and already worked for BMW in the purchasing department.

The first thing I got to know on my first day was that the Thursday was a holiday in Geneva – not too bad news for the first day … Besides that the first week was mainly about organizational stuff and getting to know the company, my colleagues and the projects I am going to work on. My manager had worked out an onboarding plan and gave me a list with people whom I should talk to – to get them to know as well as getting a broader understanding of the whole business I am in. It was just great – everyone took a really huge amount of her/his time and patience to help me. Nearly every meeting lasted twice the time that I had asked for! That really eased up my start.

With the second week I finally started on my project work – but don’t worry! Not for too long, as my manager was able to get me into a presentation skills training – also not the worst thing regarding my incredible working time of 5 days so far ;-)

The third week then was almost decadent: Tuesday caviar and Thursday champagne.

The reason for the caviar was a senior management visit. You should have been into the office at Tuesday morning – it was just like in school before a test. Everyone being nearly panic, running around for information, hectically talking to her colleagues – quite funny from an external point of view ;-) But as I nearly bumped into the senior finance manager I learned that they were really cool guys. He just laughed, gave me his hand and introduced himself. Later in the day (while having caviar) I got to talk to the other senior manager who was also very nice. I mean which senior manager takes his time to talk 10 minutes to an intern?

However Thursday there was a little celebration about a product approval which of course had to be partied with champagne.

So far so good for the first three weeks!

Cheers

Thomas

P.S.: Yes, I did work in my third week ;-)