I"ll start off this blog post with a rather interesting observation that was made in Frankfurt about business in Germany. When a contract is made these are the following scenarios based on general business practice:

American contract law, contract is made, lawyers look it over and its often broken and revised.

French contract law, managers make a contract, but its solely there for law purposes. Often managers make mutual agreements that may not even take into account the contract but is mutually beneficial for both.

German contract law, everything is iron clad, no-one ever dreams of veering for the contract.

Of course these are definately generalisations and in a globalised society lines are all blurred, but is interesting to see the observations of a CEO who houses several large multinationals in his buildings such as Lufthansa and Siemens. Last weekend I had the chance to visit a friend in Frankfurt (my friend is also at St Andrews university) and take a tour of the city. Compared to Cologne, Frankfurt is very modern but still has old squares and remnants of ancient architecture as well as a dom (cathedral). One street you may find the world's top investment banks, and one along an ancient opera house. Maybe once my career takes off I will be taking business trips there. One can only hope!

Work has taken on a new life this week with a slew of important meetings discussing the teams progress. So this means a fair amount of pressure and plenty of tasks to do. I've also been drafted into a second project to help out with a certain tool that I had worked with on my original project that is now being implemented on another project. Busy busy busy! I still can't believe i've been in Germany for four and a half weeks now, the time has just zipped by, but i've made plenty of new friends and contacts that I know I will keep in touch with when I get back to Scotland. One such person is Ian Knights who is head of training and development for Bayer. Rob and I had a chance to have lunch with him last week and we touched on a variety of topics but one which was particularly interesting was the use of social networking in the job search. Whilst the negatives of this are well publicised the positives are often not. Sites such as linkedin help people connect easily to a variety of old friends and colleagues and can spur on opportunities. With this in mind, if we do not have an intern group on linkedin like the fellows then i'll create one!

Rob and I also received some rather exciting news this week; that we would be getting the chance to meet the head of Bayer Healthcare, Alan Higgins. He's had a hand at turning around the fortunes of over 50% of the Bayer group and making it into a well oiled machine! Interns at Bayer rarely get the chance to meet someone this high up the hierarchy so i'm glad we will have the opportunity. Until next time....