Heidelberg - Day Two

Not much to talk about today. Got up early and all the RISE Scholars (i.e. students who are in the same internship program that I am in) got split up into smaller groups to go on tours of different companies around the region. The groups were created in a fashion so that most people could tour a company that was in a industry related to their field of study. I ended up going to Boehringer-Ingelheim (hereafter"BI"), one of Germany's larges pharmaceutical and chemical companies (on a different note, did you know that Deutsche Post, Germany's postal service, is the world's second largest employer [behind Walmart] with 500k employees? The United States Parcel Service has only 400k employees. And now you know.). Boehringer-Ingelheim has over 45,000 employees worldwide and several plants in Europe and at least one in the United States. And let me tell you, they have money!

First sign that they are rolling in the capital: They are still privately traded. The two founding families own all the stock and are the two richest families in Europe. They flipped 11 billion Euro in revenue last year, and it shows (it also shows that I really paid attention to the tour). We arrived at the BI campus in the German town of Ingelheim (I know, crazy coincidence, right?) to discover a couple of things. Firstly, the campus is larger than the rest of the town put together, and secondly, it's secure enough that it makes Steve Jobs a little jealous. We're talking guards, gates, fences, little badgey-things to get in and out. It was pretty impressive. While we were there, we had to wear these visitor badges at all times. One of the scholars took his off and, well, we haven't seen him since..........

Quick couple of interesting facts: German factories (i.e. BI) prefer to use glass pipes so they can see what is going on inside (which is pretty cool), while American companies prefer to use stronger, yet opaque, metal pipes. Also, I wanted to point out that I met another student from OSU who was also a RISE Scholar for the summer. Neither one of us knew that the other was participating in the program, and it was just by chance that we bumped into each other.

Anyway, I digress. First we went through this little BI corporate museum, and then watched a thirty-minute video on the history of the company, and then after that we had coffee and pastries provided to us free of charge by the BI Catering Service. After our coffee break, we sat in on a presentation given by one of the company department heads in charge of scaling up production of chemicals to a manufacturing scale. After his presentation we toured a couple of their labs (really clean and fancy looking places) as well as their pilot-plant, which it turns out it is the place they attempt at large-scale production before sending it to the manufacturers to avoid all of those complicated faux pas.

After the tours were over all of the scholars went out to dinner. The majority of the students ate dinner at the Heidelberg brewery, but those of us who were cool enough, got to go to this little restaurant down the street. Yeah our service wasn't as good and we didn't get as much food, but we did have this old guy who played the piano at our restaurant, and that was good enough to make up for it all. Actually, the brewery group got out of their meal almost two hours after the other group, by which time Chris (see Strasbourg), a fellow from John Hopkins named Graham, and I had already enjoyed Nutella Crepes served to us by a Pakistani gentleman who apparently had travelled extensively along the US / Canadian border. We wandered along the river and then stood on a pedestrian bridge over the locks and watched the ships plow by. It made for a pretty good Friday night.

So with that said, "Who's ready for a coffee break?".