Novartis
After loads of nerve-wracking, I finally landed an internship at Novartis. Novartis is one of the biggest multinational companies and I was working in its Vaccine and Diagnosis division. The plant was in Ankleshwar (Gujarat).
Ankleshwar is a small industrial town near the banks of river Narmada. GIDC is an industrial area housing this place, and has more than 1400 chemical industries in all. You can just imagine the level of pollution there. All the smell (obnoxious, pungent, sharp etc) which you might have heard of while learning inorganic chemistry came flooding back to my memory. Anyway, this is what the industrial areas are like. All the big players in the core chemical industry from Asian Paints to Bayer to Aventis to ONGC can be found here.
The main product of the plant I worked at is the Rabipur Vaccine, which is a vaccine for Rabies. There are only 2 plants across the globe which produce this vaccine, the other one being in Germany.
Life on the plant
The first 15 days were all about introductions to the people and the workings of our plant. We went to all the sections from Production to Engineering to Quality and it was fascinating to see how the entire department worked together. The vaccine came under the header of life saving drugs, so the quality of the product was of utmost priority for the plant. One thing one should keep in mind is that when you go to any place for an internship, you end up taking your brand name with you, whether you like it or not. Always remember that guys in the corporate world think that we have loads of brain and a high intellectual level (just an emotional way to exploiting us :P). Anyway, I was given a project in the QA (quality assurance) department. The best part of the internship was seeing and realising that the projects given were actually useful and of some worth to the plant. My project included planning and reviewing “Deviations and CAPA management”, finding potential gaps in it and how to fill them. Finally, I came up with some good ideas. We worked on a VBA code and made a very efficient excel sheet which could update entries automatically. I tell you one thing-these guys in industry become very happy with us if we do even a tiny bit of work which shows. These sheets shaved hours and hours off the routines of quite a few employees, essentially automating whatever data-entry used ot be done manually till now. Recently I came to know that those excel sheets have been implemented on their LANs and it gives me great satisfaction now.
Life apart from work
The weekend just consisted of Sundays and we never missed our opportunity to explore new places. I visited Daman, Vadodara, Surat and Ahmadabad and one thing I can say for sure is that Gujarat is the best place to live (just leave the fact that it’s a “dry” state ). I had one of my friends in Vadodara and visited him frequently. The city is seriously good. Not that big, not that populated but still modern enough for a very good life style. One of the beautiful places near Ankleshwar is “Kabirvad” situated on the banks of Narmada. The only sources of entertainment were the multiplexes there.
Finally I had a very nice overall experience in Novartis and I think that Pharmacy is one of the best sectors for a chemical engineer. In all seriousness, there is huge money involved in this and the promise of a good future too. And best part is that it is recession free. For more details about pharmacy industries do contact me: rajan.iitb@gmail.com
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