Friday, May 11, 2007

Among the Redwoods..

Hello guys!

Long time not talk to you…life here is so busy and now I finally understand what they meant when, the first week spent in Silicon Valley, a guy from BAIA told us: Trust me, you will forget to eat and you won’t have enough time to sleep! Gaetano, did you remember? It was Giorgio and we were in the Redwood Room of one of the nicest hotel in San Francisco! Ok, he was right, but when I think to the future and to how I will remember this wonderful experience, I realize the importance of this blog…it will be great to read again these notes and the comments left by people met here. We’ll be missing all of them and this blog will be a way to retrace moments spent together and to keep in touch! Sometimes I love technology!!!
Inside a tree..

So, coming back to our daily activities…at present I am working as an Intern in the Business Development Unit of CoMentis (formerly Athenagen), a private held biotech company located in South San Francisco.




Every day I commute from San Jose, it takes about 50 minutes…it’s a long trip, but fortunately I don’t travel alone but I do carpool with my dear flat-mate Valentina, cause she works in the city as well, so we can talk during the trip and also take advantage of the carpool lane in the freeway (it goes much faster and it‘s funny to overtake other cars!). Btw, my daily schedule is from 8.30 to 3.30, because later I have to be in Santa Clara for our evening classes starting at 5 pm. So far, I have enjoyed very much my working activity at CoMentis: I mean, everything is pretty new for me…I have never worked before in the business field, dealing with finance and accounting stuff…but is so interesting to learn new things and in activities like competitive intelligence analysis or companies evaluation, I have the chance to use my scientific background to better understand the commercial landscape and to monitor competitors. What I hope is to keep on in this job and to learn as much as possible!

Moreover, we are going on writing our business plan through Mr Decitre class: it is very challenging, but the more you put in it, the more you will get from this exercise and I really hope to be able to capitalize on this work once come back to Italy!

Before saying goodbye, I’d like you to enjoy this wonderful picture taken by Micol last week end (thanks Micol for this wonderful reportage!). We were just outside San Francisco (Point Reyes), but the countryside was so quiet and beautiful that we felt like being miles away!!


The Lighthouse and the Ocean..... wonderful...


Among the Redwoods....
See you later,




Yours,




elizabeth

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Hello folks,

Long time no write you…I am very sorry for it because this blog is going to be the diary of this amazing experience!!!

However, now we are in the middle of the second quarter and in the heart of the internship…and it lasts only 2 months before going back to Italy……….NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO….what a terrible thing to say…

Let me explain why we are so sad…it is not because we don’t want to go back to Italy (actually, we miss it a lot!!!) but because these months here were so exciting…and challenging…and busy…and funny…and…so on….that we haven’t really realized that the time was passing very fast and this program is going to end!!!!

By the way, today I am going to talk you about the company where I am performing my internship.

FivePrime Therapeutics, Inc. is a pre-clinical stage biotech company discovering and developing innovative protein and antibody therapeutics. FivePrime is using its world-class discovery platform to build a strong pipeline that currently includes products in development for cancer and diabetes and multiple leads in metabolic and immunologic diseases, oncology and regenerative medicine.

FivePrime is located in Mission Bay in San Francisco…


................yyyeeessss…it is exactly what now you are thinking….I
commute everyday from San Jose’ to the city…



.............fortunately, Elisabetta works in South San Francisco so we do carpool together and it makes the commute a little bit less heavy and boring!!!

I work with the business development team to figure out the potential market for a new protein the company is developing.

It is very interesting and stimulating working with the BDU team..I have always worked in the Academia and, in particular, in the lab, so you can image how everything is completely new and challenging for me!!!! I am really honoured and happy to have the possibility to join such a successful and competitive company!!!

Now, let me talk you about a party where we went a couple of weeks ago….the Yuri’s Night Party at the NASA research center…

Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into space on April 12th, 1961. The US Space Shuttle first launched on April 12th, 1981. Yuri's Night is like the St Patricks Day or Cinco de Mayo for space. It is one day when all the world can come together and celebrate the power and beauty of space and what it means for each of us.







The BEST!!!!!!!



It was a really funny and amazing party and it lasted until late!!!

Ok…that’s enough for today…write to you soon
Besos

Vally