In my first full week of internships and classes, I learned a lot more here in Milan. To start, in my Corporate Social Responsibility class this week, we began discussing our Wall Street Journal posts and how the content from the material speaks about the responsibility corporations have. One that stood to me was California is trying to ban certain chemicals in food, most notably a chemical that makes skittles red. In summary, Mars corporation does not want to ban the chemical because they believe it should be left up to the FDA to make these decisions and California wants to ban it because of potential health consequences from consumption of the chemical. The dilemma here is that the chemical they want to ban has already been approved by the FDA in 1970. At what point now does Mars corporation has to take another look at their ingredients list and redo a safety check for a chemical approved 50 years ago? so much has changed, both technologically and biologically, that maybe 50 year old processes aren’t actually accurate. This discussion really made me think about other corporate safety procedures that probably has not been reviewed in decades and how it is an ethical concern these aren’t being looked at.
At my internship of Tempocasa, me and Jon continued our work on the analysis of Real Estate in the US vs Italy. After finalizing our research on Tuesday, we began and finished the PowerPoint we will present this upcoming week. Our final results showed that while many of the processes are similar, there are some aspects in buying and selling of property that differs. I am very nervous for this presentation as it will be our first big project we need to turn in for internship. Also, the language barrier may make it a harder to communicate with our audience, especially our supervisor who will be evaluating our work. In the end, I do believe we will succeed in this presentation from all the hard work we put in.
In my adventures within Italy, I have done a lot more exploring this week. On Sunday, I visited the Ferrari museum they have here and learned all about the rich history of one of the most renowned car brands in the world. What I learned from this experience is that through each iteration of racing cars and engines made by Ferrari, they always improved on previous models and innovated new ways do it. Also, on Friday, we visited Verona. My first impression of Verona when walking thorough was how different it was compared to Milan. While much of the architecture remained the same, the people and atmosphere just felt very different. While in Verona, we visited the Montresor Winery and visited the famous landmarks such as the Juliet Balcony and Verona Arena. All throughout this trip, I learned much more about Italian culture such as more on the wine making process. I am really thankful for such an amazing experience and I hope I can do back to Verona some time again.
