Fortune 500 Company Internship

Position and Tasks, Relevance to the studies

I did a 4 month long internship for a Fortune 500 company in Shanghai.  During my internship as a marketing analyst in various projects I was assigned a number of meaningful tasks.  For instance, my main task was to assist the marketing Director in developing and issuing a marketing segmentation and strategic plan for the company.  Other types of tasks involved data mining and several types of other researches. I found the internship really useful as all the tasks I was assigned were relevant to all the subjects that I had previously studied in my university degree such as marketing and communications.  In addition, it was amazing to get an opportunity to work and receive guidance from people who have so many years of corporate knowledge in the Chinese business market, I felt that their first hand experience in the field definitely helped me to learn my roles as an intern much quickly. I also found the fact that my director and other members of staff were available if I had questions to be really useful in my progress to fitting in with the company as I always felt like I knew what was going on and what was expected from me on a daily basis.

Main Learning Points

I learnt many new skills and knowledge in the field of mostly marketing, such as the prepaid market and data mining. Due to adapting to the company really well I was offered a one year job contract with this Fortune 500 Company, which I feel is a great opportunity and an amazing achievement to have made as seen as I had just graduated from university!  I accepted the job straight away as I had thoroughly enjoyed my time at the company and they had made me feel so welcome since day one.   I am looking forward to continuing to work for this company as I can further expand my business skills. Therefore, I would strongly advice people to do an internship especially newly graduates as it helps you to further improve those business skills you gained at university and really help you to enter the real world of work as well as prepare you for it.   I would recommend other people to work for this company as I gained a lot of insight on how big corporate companies advertise and construct strategic plans. I was able to learn a lot really quickly which made me feel like I was getting the most out of the internship.   However, I would say it depends what you want to gain from your internship as I was locally hired in Shanghai and I wanted to work for a big well known corporate company where my internship was more structured and delegated. Another advantage of doing an internship with such a well known business is the fact that the work force is extremely mixed as there is a number of expats and local employees. I thought this was a good thing to experience as the business market is so global nowadays an important skill to have is to be able to communicate in some form with people from all walks of life as well as have a principal understanding of other cultures.

Food, Transportation and Visa

At lunch times I was able to access different kinds of restaurants as the company was located in a very commercial spot.  In general, I feel that Shanghai is really affordable to eat out as it offers a number of Chinese local restaurants as well as many western franchise restaurants who always have special menu offer on.  I on average spent 2,000 RMB on food a month. In addition, transportation is fairly cheap too if you travel around on the metro or buses. I would mostly get on the metro which is only 4RMB each way so I normally spent around 300RMB a month on transportation. During the internship I was on my Student visa granted to me by my university.

Steven (25), Cameroon

Local Chinese Company Internship | Learn "Made in China" Internship