Jennifer Beattie's Blog Post #6: June 20th, 2024 | 2024 Lehigh-in-Milan with Professor Gupta

We watched the documentary on corporations and brought up the discussion of whether are corporations the problem in society. The documentary made a diagnosis that corporations are psychopaths based on their ways of running their corporations and the structure that they have. My group discussed this topic and we concluded that for the most part, corporations are psychopaths because their main motive is creating revenue and they are good at lobbying the government to sway people in power to get the things that they want. An example would be the large farm corporations that are more concerned with injecting their animals with hormones to make them bigger so they can mass produce these food products not concerned with the quality of the food that they are putting into everyone’s grocery stores and bodies. It was interesting to argue this with my group because some members were so in it that corporations ar 100% the problem and others said it depended on what the corporation was who were their leaders and what were their goals. It is interesting to see other people’s points of view, but I think that there is no way for corporations to also be involved in the government and be able to manipulate the government to get what they want to generate revenue. If corporations were not psychopaths, then why are so many of them investigated for fudging numbers and being involved in antitrust lawsuits, etc? There are so many ways they are still violating so many things and just pay the fine when they are caught.

In class, we talked about our networking event that we have next Thursday and we were reminded to tell our employers about it so that they will come to it as well. Also, we continued our discussion over how our internships have been going these past few weeks and we talked about what is something that we have been able to notice now being here over a month that a tourist or someone just visiting the country would not be able to notice. And what first came to my mind was the level of equality in my workplace. My boss’s boss is technically the head, and everyone else including my boss and the interns are all on pretty much the same level. We are all respected with our opinions and no one is better than the other based on their rank. I have also realized that there is more respecting the older people here even if they are not higher then you business-wise. It is extremely important to respect the older people including getting up on the bus for them and making sure you use formal greetings with them.

In our internship this week we are still creating an email template to send out to potential buyers for the trade show SIGEP coming up in January. We are waiting on approval from the actual SIGEP team, so we have just been going through our system and identifying potential people we can send out our emails to and preparing everything we need so that when we get the okay from SIGEP, we are ready full force to send out emails. We also have been editing the previous year’s email because it was made in Italian and needs to be translated and edited to make sure it is grammatically correct and professional. I enjoy going to work every day and sitting at a desk with everyone and on Wednesday, we went to our boss’s house again to have lunch and he made us amazing lasagna. It is so fun to have a working relationship yet also build an out-of-work relationship with these people during lunch.

This weekend on Friday we took a day trip to Venice and on Saturday we took a day trip to Monterosso in Cinque Terre. In Venice, we took a boat through the canals and walked around the entire city looking through some museums and were able to walk through the small streets that had little canals everywhere it was so beautiful to walk through. On Saturday, we decided to go to Monterosso which is a popular beach town in Cinque Terre which was stunning. The clear blue water surrounded by a beach but also surrounded by mountains was unreal. We took the train into Monterosso and came out of the tunnel straight to the beach so it was a small beach town but it was beautiful to be able to relax at the warm beach in the sun. The water was so clear and blue and the town was lovely. For dinner, we got pesto, since Cinque Terre is known for their pesto and it was so delicious to eat and just overall a great experience and a great weekend!