Gilead Sciences – Evan O & Matthew S – CA Work Experience Program

6/2

Midtown Plaza Lobby

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.

6/1

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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.

5/31

Today, after we worked on our presentation to the school and Mark, the CIO of Gilead Sciences, we did a dry run presentation to Mike, one of our mentors. He gave both me and Matthew a lot of helpful tips for our presentation. Not just things about the slideshow, but also about how we, as people, present. He pointed out some of the unconscious fidgets I do while presenting and how I can fix them, and gave Matthew some pointers on how he could improve his speaking. I think this was really helpful, not just for the presentation but also for going anywhere in the future. Here’s a photo of our whiteboarding process for creating the slideshow.

5/30

We had the day off today, since it’s memorial day, so I don’t have anything to share. I used the day off to play with my family’s new puppy, so I decided to include a picture of her as my required media for this post. Her name is Mayday, and she’s a Belgian Malinois and Whippet Mix. The only time I could get a good photo of her was when she was asleep, because she doesn’t stay still long enough for a photo when shes awake.

5/27

We worked from home today since most people do not come into the office on Friday, including our mentors for this program. We started with a zoom call with Deepti about what we would be working on from home, but after that it was free reign to complete yesterdays work. I asked some questions while I was on the zoom call, but I had more during my work, so I did some research and went to geeks for geeks and managed to solve my bug. Here is my final product of that day’s assigned work! I’m pretty proud of this one, it took a lot of work and I think it looks nice.

5/26

Today we learned how to use R (a programming language for statistical analysis) to analyze and graph covid data, and I really like this language. It’s intuitive, the commands make sense, and the stuff you can do with it is really impressive! Here is some of the example work created with the data, this specific data set is about heart disease correlation with cholesterol levels, but our work today was focused on trying to graph covid data from the WHO. I can share some of my progress tomorrow.

5/26

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.

5/25

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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.

5/25

Today, after getting feedback on our graphics from yesterday, we learned how to use PowerBI to create a dashboard with statistics. PowerBI is a very efficient tool to create graphs, as it automatically creates charts when you combine two columns from excel, using whatever type of graph it thinks fits best or you manually select. I really like using PowerBI to display information, it is an excellent tool and I think it will help me in my career to be proficient in PowerBI. Here is the first dashboard I created, with the same WHO covid statistics.

5/24

Today was our first day in the office, and what a great way to start! We began by meeting the other two people who would be most involved in our internship, Mike and Depti, and learning more about their jobs and what the company does as a whole. The fun part was after lunch, when we were given COVID data from the WHO and had to answer questions about statistics from the countries and regions using excel to create pivot tables and pivot charts. We created graphics to show answers to these questions and will present them tomorrow morning for feedback. Here’s a graphic I created to show the vaccination statistics by region.