Internship in China

My days in China are almost at the end now. I have worked as a student intern for 6 months in MSRA at Beijing, China. I know it will be an unforgettable experience for me. My perspectives have broadened by meeting so many nice people and living in this fascinating country. I will definitely recommend my friends to spend some time in other countries when they are in their twenties, especially for doing an internship or participating in a student exchange program.

However, in an internship program for master/Ph.D. students, there certainly exist some drawbacks. Especially in my case, I am a master student and still I have not decided about my future. I am in a great dilemma whether to continue with Ph.D. or opt for a job; I should have made a decision previous hand before applying for this program. 

The first and imperative problem, which I encountered, was communication. For daily life, there was not so much of a problem for me because I have studied Chinese for several years. However, presenting my work in detail using some other language was much harder than I had expected. I was always under the impression that my English skills are above average, but I had hard time in explaining my work in English in front of a huge crowd. Since, the presentation of my work involves numerous figures and numerical formulas, using words which are not often used in daily life was particularly hard for me. In addition, writing appropriate e-mails also needed concentration and much more time to complete.

Other than the communication problem, understanding the background of discussions and catching major points of research were also hard for me, because advising style of the mentor was entirely different from my professor. In my opinion, that is the major difference and gap between a company and the school. Mentor is only interested in sophisticated view of the project, while my professor was always interested in details of a subject. Consequently, working amid two different people created confusion for me during the research period.

I sometimes think that I was too eager to apply for this program at the earliest. I could have achieved much more experience by being a Ph.D. student at my place rather than as a master student. However, I am still young and have many more years to be upgraded. Isn't there a saying, “we can learn more from hard times than good times”? Next time when I face another challenge, I will be the person who is more prepared and more trained than I am at present.

Well, it was very nice meeting you, China!