Nimenhao!
Working in Shanghai has been awesome so far. Training for the various aspects of the job is an ongoing process and will continue right up to the end of my internship. Although there are a lot of Chinese graduates working in the office, the company caters mostly to expats in the Asia Pacific region so most of the top executives are either American or British. We’re learning a lot from these accomplished managers and they’ve taken a hands-on approach with all of the interns and their individual projects. It’s also nice to have all these great contacts now, and I’m sure it will come in handy when I start looking for an internship within the States next year.
I would say that the overall office environment can be quite competitive because everyone is trying to close in on deals and secure investments from their own client lists and they don’t want others stepping on their toes. But, we also have to work together in teams for projects that are related to improving the user interface of their in-house software and coming up with new sectors to tap. Later we started to get familiar with the back-end of the website they use to maintain the relationships they have with their clients online, and we also ran mock meetings to get used to the whole presentation style (and sales pitch for potential investors) by the time a real meeting comes around.
Earlier in the week we took part in an induction ceremony that showed us how Chinese business practices and etiquette could differ from Western ones. I thought the most important one was the ‘friends before business’ rule which I’ve been experiencing everyday when meeting with new colleagues, interns, or local clients. In the West, you could do business with someone who you don’t really know well, and professional or personal relationships could potentially develop later while doing business with those acquaintances. Here, people are extremely reluctant to work with you unless they get a good sense of your background, so it’s extremely important to take people out to lunch/drinks and have them get comfortable with you at a one-on-one level, and behave in a manner that wouldn’t cause them to ‘lose face (mianzi)’.
I’m definitely looking forward to the weeks ahead. Some of the interns and I are planning to take a trip to Hangzhou over the weekend. My limited Mandarin skills, which I thought would be a major stumbling block to moving around here, aren’t really getting in the way. The subway system I use to get to work is probably easier to figure out than the ones in the U.S. or London, although the size of the crowds can be unsettling. But mostly everything here is really efficient and modern, and I really have to come back here on a holiday sometime to fully experience all the amazing things that the city has to offer.
Well I have to get back to my individual project now and I’ve also got to prepare for tomorrow’s tasks so I’ll catch you guys next week!
