Jason Keller (President)

This summer, I worked at a biotech company called Applied Biosystems, located across the bay in Foster City. They make all sorts of lab equipment like DNA synthesizers and sequencers, PCR machines, and human identification kits (think CSI). I found out about the company when my boss came to Berkeley to speak at an infosession; we kept in touch, and I ended up applying to work for him (and getting hired!).  My title was Process Improvement, which sounds vague but basically I offered support to one of the consumables manufacturing groups -- by "support," I mean anything from testing and validating their equipment, to written Standard Operating Procedure documents, to helping figure out what went wrong when a QC (quality control) problem came up.  It was a lot of fun, and EXTREMELY educational.  It showed me what life at a biotech company is really like, which is something you just can't get in our typical BioE courses.  I highly encourage anyone interested in industry to NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK, come out to BMES corporate events and infosessions, and get a summer internship under your belt!