It has been a long time for me not to wake up before 5:30 am, but I have to because the bus heading to Thousand Oaks was leaving at 7:00 am.
Probably due to the proximity in location between Santa Barbara and Thousand Oaks, Amgen, a big pharmaceutical company, has a long history of close relationship with UCSB; each year they send people working in different departments to give lectures to the students from UCSB. At the end of the course, students have the chance to visit the headquarter of Amgen.
We saw the pilot plant for making biologics, the formulation group for designing proper ways to deliver drugs to the body, the small molecule group with a huge repository for storing over sixteen million different compounds, the molecular design demonstration, and a cell biology core facility. One unit in particular was really interesting: a robot is built to simulate any kind of collision the well packaged final products may face with during transportation; they want to make sure the formulation can make the products stable enough; people don't want to see any shattered glass before injection.
As a chemical engineer by training, the process scale chromatography column with diameter more than 40 cm and the giant vessel for growing cells didn't surprised me, but the working atmosphere in Amgen did -- everyone seems to enjoy their job, and I believe Amgen treats every single employee as a valuable person; also one can get smarter by collaborating with the people around.
Today's tour is a great experience I should say. But come on IRS, don't send a mail telling me I owe you money and you need it within ten days...
五點半起床就為了坐車到鄰近聖塔芭芭拉的千橡市參觀安進藥廠。上了一學期安進的人開的課著實學到許多製藥產業的知識，尤其安進主力做的是生物藥而不是小分子藥，和大學時的訓練有些差距。
親眼見證化工製程放大測試用的pilot plant，跟上回去宜蘭金車酒廠看到的東西有87分像，還看到直徑超過40公分的層析管柱(一根要五十萬美金...)。一間藥廠不像想像中只有製程儀器，還有龐大的研發部門，並且下轄非常多小專業：有看細胞的,搞組合化學的,分子模擬的,管配方賦型的,懂代謝工程的,搞程序控制的,當然還有製程放大的化學工程師們
有些東西都在教科書上看過了並不足為奇，讓我驚訝的是感覺得到那裡的員工很樂在其中，很注重人才的價值(不知道是不是美國的企業都這樣)，他們還說跟不同部門的人打交道感覺自己都變聰明了，除了工作也是自我成長。
只不過一回去就收到國稅局寄來的信要催繳稅金，中國室友神救援讓我知道money order這玩意怎麼用。
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