Author: matthew_schricker

Sadly, today concluded our two week work experience program at Gilead Sciences. To end the day, we presented our work and learning to some higher-ups and fielded questions. We even had the CIO Mark Berson come to attend, which was really an honor. Although their questions were hard and technical, we had fun while doing it and felt it was good preparation for tomorrow’s WEP presentations. It was also cool to just meet and present to the executives of a big company like Gilead. Our mentors were impressed with all of the learning we’ve done, and we expressed how extremely thankful we are to them for everything they’ve done. From their endless enthusiasm, bringing us out to lunch in Northills, or giving us lessons on interesting data analytics, their work made the WEP exciting and engaging.  I hope that rising Seniors next year at Cary Academy will also be able to attend a WEP at Gilead Sciences, because it was a truly rewarding experience.

Today was the much awaited ribbon cutting ceremony, which meant that there were loads of higher ups from California and Ireland coming into the office for a tour. There were also guests from the government, like the Mayor of Raleigh, and other guests including people like Dr. Goodnight of SAS. We were introduced to so many of the higher-ups at Gilead, and it was really spectacular to meet people who are so important to the pharmaceutical industry. After meeting us, a couple more people wanted to join our end of WEP presentation to Mark Berson (Gilead’s CIO and Cary Academy parent). Having close to a dozen higher-ups at the company come to watch the presentation is a bit scary, so we made sure to do lots of dry runs to our mentors, David, Deepti, and Michael. It’s really hard to express how cool attending this event was, as it really felt like a VIP meeting. Last note, we went to Cowfish for lunch with our mentors, definitely a lot of fun.

It was exciting to learn today more about R code and its applications in analyzing data. Deepti was really helpful in teaching us about not only the applications of analyzing data but also teaching us the basics of using R. As I’m taking Staculus next year, I’m hoping that this introduction will help me in that class. In the morning we worked a bit more on Power BI with data sets about Covid in the US, and then presented our results to Deepti. After lunch, she gave us a sample R file to explore and then the task of analyzing the data from two days ago – this time in R. We were able to get the same results as before, so we’re excited to present to her tomorrow.

 

Today we presented our data and graphs on Covid vaccination data to our mentors, and received feedback on not only our methods of analyzing the data but also the data/how to present. Armed with these responses, we moved into learning how to use Power BI, a program used to visualize data. Professionals often use this program to summarize the results of their work, so it was really cool to see some of our data become aesthetic. I think our graphs were already posted, so I put a picture of where we work, which is in this wide-windowed conference room on the 8th floor. Tomorrow, we’ll be learning more about R coding and how to find correlations within data, as well as graphing data through R.

 

 

Today was really busy, as we learned first about the basics of data science and then completed a small project. It was our first time in the office, so it was really cool to work in the modern buildings at Northills, especially with the wide windowed conference rooms. We were taught in the morning about the process of data analytics and met Gilead Sciences’s CIO (Chief information officer). Since both of us had no prior experience to data analytics, it was an eye-opening experience to see how companies have entire departments dedicated to the collection and analysis of data. After getting lunch at a restaurant elsewhere in Northills, we were given our first project of analyzing vaccination data across the world. We organized WHO website data using excel functions for the rest of the afternoon and will present our results tomorrow. We heard that tomorrow we’ll be doing more programming and advanced data analytics tomorrow, so we’re pretty excited about it.

Evan and I met with our mentor, David Ungaro, today to plan out the rest of our WEP and to schedule coming into the office tomorrow. David also explained more about what Gilead Science stands for and the status of the office. It turns out that this building was built less than a year ago in Northills, and they’re actually having the opening party next week. His work consists of taking data from pharmaceutical manufacturing lines and finding ways that the processes can be improved. From our conversation, it seems like our work in the next two weeks will depend a lot on what we find most interesting, and we’ll look more into that tomorrow. Either way, I’m excited to see what we learn from this experience.

For the next two weeks, I will be working with Gilead Sciences, a worldwide pharmaceutical firm known for its groundbreaking Hepatitis C and HIV drugs. They’re also starting to work more in the cancer sector, with over a dozen clinical trials in the pipeline. Although I don’t know all the details yet, I have heard that Evan and I will work on a project of some kind for a large portion of the WEP, as well as working in their Raleigh office.

Matthew