Editor's note: Marcel Marius is a German student and graduate of the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program, which brings international students to Berkeley to study entrepreneurship. His blog post below originally appeared on his personal blog. It has been edited for clarity and length.

My favorite aspect about the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program (BHGAP) are the company visits. The main purpose of these visits is to present Silicon Valley’s way of life regarding business culture. Therefore, we visit several companies every Friday starting within the first weeks of the program. There is a lot to learn about Silicon Valley, the high-tech start-ups, their unique working culture and their story and mission.

The special and essential feature of our company visits is the different sizes of the companies we visit, ranging from small young stage start-ups to multibillion dollar well-known companies. It is very interesting to see the big differences between the workplace culture, decision making and management of each.

Just a Few of the Companies we Visited 

We have been to: 

• Mozilla Firefox

• Salesforce

• LimeBike

• BootUp

• Spotify

• Google

• Orange

• Ripple

• Oracle

The program and the company visits show you so much about the entreprenurial and innovative mindset that is common in this area. Silicon Valley could be defined as the place where you share as much information as you can because everybody out here will not think about how to steal your idea, but rather how to help you bring it to life or make it better. They want to enhance every idea even if it is not their own.

If you want to truly learn about Silicon Valley, you cannot miss experiencing different companies. With the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program, you will be sure to visit the hottest companies.