Internship: I started the week by working remotely on Monday. I continued my search from last week of researching start-up companies that use artificial intelligence for budgeting and forecasting purposes. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I worked in the office and was given more tasks. Now that Polina, the director of our internship work, came back this week from vacation, she worked with Caroline and I further on enhancing our research. She also helped us formulate messages in contacting these startup companies that we found, and we had to respond to them and set up phone calls to explain to these companies more about Fin+Tech. I did not make a phone call yet on my own, but I was able to listen to Polina and the other intern, Francesco, make the phone calls and learn from them so that I will hopefully be able to do it on my own soon.
Exploring: I started out this week with an incredible day trip to Venice. I went with Emily and another friend and we had an incredible time getting lost in the beautiful, tiny streets of Venice. We started the day with a gondola ride through all of the canals and I learned that Venice is made up of 118 islands. After, we shopped around and went into five different leather stores, chocolate shops, and many jewelry stores. I bought myself a green leather purse and a black leather backpack, and then three leather wallets and a lot of chocolate as souvenir gifts for family. We then went to lunch and the pigeons would not leave us alone. Finally, we ended the day by visiting Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge. The rest of the week was mostly spent on class, homework, my internship, and reading in my free time. On Thursday night, we all went to dinner together for Sam’s birthday and that was a lot of fun. On Friday after class, I went with a couple of other people from the group to a cooking class where we learned to make pizza and gelato. It was a great experience.
Class: We started class this week by watching The Corporation documentary and I found this to be very eye opening. It basically described the falsities and ugliness that happens behind the scenes in corporations. I was shocked at the point in the documentary when the guy was being interviewed who talked about faking job interviews to competitor employees to find out more information about the competitor companies. The way he showed no remorse or guilt for tricking people and called himself a predator shocked me. In Wednesday’s class, we spent most of our time debating the Wall Street Journal articles. The first one we debated was about Merck Pharmaceuticals versus the US government and whether or not the US should be able to set prices for medical products. I personally do not think they should be able to because then Merck will not be able to make profits that then helps them conduct more research to find drugs for other illnesses. It also then would provide no incentive for pharma companies to even exist if the government is just going to regulate all prices. Next, we discussed an article about whether or not companies should make public statements on their opinion of social issues. In a perfect world, companies would not get involved in social issues that do not regard their business at all, and politics would stay separate from consumerism. However, that is very unrealistic and companies are constantly caught in the middle of social issues and oftentimes feeling like they have to make public statements about their opinions.
