On my second day in Cyprus, I learned from two prominent companies in the pharmaceutical and gaming industries.

First, we hopped on a bus to Limassol to visit the pharmaceutical company Medochemie. I researched this company in our pre-departure meetings, but the knowledge I gained before the trip paled in comparison to what I learned actually going to the company itself. We visited the headquarters of the whole company, and just viewing the offices there was a learning experience. It was refreshing to see workers actually in an office an collaborating, compared to working at home which has become ever more popular. We heard two people speak at this meeting, someone working in quality assurance and someone working in supply chain management. It was fascinating to hear about the amount of responsibility that the woman working in quality assurance had. In the past, pharmaceutical products that were promised to be safe and effective have led to severe side effects and deformities. Now there are government-mandated standards and people like her to make sure that never happens again. On the supply chain side of the meeting, It was illuminating to see the immense scope and long time period the supply chain managers in Medochemie oversee. The process to get a product out into the market takes around 5-10 years and includes many different steps including testing, procurement of supplies, and transportation of the finished product. The number of interrelated factors being managed over a long time period was enormous.

The next company meeting we had was with two employees at the video game company wargaming. As we didn’t visit one of their sites, I thought this meeting was less informative about the culture of the company. One thing I did notice was that the Wargaming employees seemed more casual than the employees at Meochemie. This was evident from their clothes and their speech. I’ve always had the notion that new-age coding companies were more progressive in their attitude, and to see it firsthand confirmed my thoughts. The second meeting was all about the process of developing a new game. First, when a prototype of a game has been created, it needs to go through the “greenlight” process to see if the game will become popular and if the company should invest more time and money into developing the game. Then, if the game passes, the “feature creep” begins, which entails adding more rich user interface features to this game. I thought this meeting taught me a lot as it showed me new vocabulary words in the world of business. Lastly, I believe this meeting will help me in the progression of my business career as it dealt with the important topic of developing ideas into marketable products.