Undergraduate(International Economics & Trade) Internship Report at Mandarinpi

(Shanghai)

School: SOUTH CHINA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Major and Year: INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS & TRADE 2011

Name: MANYANGA INNOCENT STEWART

Student No. 201169103131

Mark:

Supervisor: Jing Nan 老师Submit Date: March 23, 2015

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Table of Contents

Objectives...............................................................................3

Introduction of the employer...........................................3

Internship contents.............................................................4

Week One:............................................................................................................................................. 4

Week Two.............................................................................................................................................. 5

Week Three.......................................................................................................................................... 6

Week Four............................................................................................................................................. 7

Internship experience........................................................8

Challenges..............................................................................9

Suggestion to the employer............................................10

Comment............................................................................................................................................ 11

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Objectives

I choose to do my internship in Mandarinpi School in Shanghai for a month because I wanted to get experience from another city out of Guangzhou and know how it feels working somewhere else in China. I also wanted to learn more about other companies such as this private mandarin school, and also help them grow up very fast and achieve their goals and ambition. Mandaripi School offered me a position of marketing for their new school so this also made me get challenge in working in a new environment with new people, and I wanted to gain this experience from them in this new environment. I considered choosing Mandarinpi because I believe I could also catch up in my mandarin skills as well, and also because it wasn’t easy to get an internship company to accept me during that time.I would like to say thank you for Mandarinpi School for giving me the opportunity to experience a working condition and experience in Shanghai city.

Introduction of the employer

Mandarinpi is a Chinese school that offer tailor made educational services. Choose group, private and online lessons. Located in the heart of Shanghai. Their official Website is http://www.mandarinpi.comSophia Lu is the Co-founder and school principal of Mandarinpi. She is a professional Mandarin teacher with an excellent reputation; her major was Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Since her final graduation, she has been engaged in Chinese language teaching in Shanghai. She loves Chinese and Chinese Culture, and hopes that she can continue teaching Chinese as a second language for her whole career.In 2013,she started Mandarinpi Chinese school. In 2014, she received an investment from YILV Airline Company. Her main goal is to ensure her students enjoy their time in China, while gaining a deep understanding of the language and the culture.

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Internship contents

Week One:

During my first days in Shanghai, I went through a short interview for the internship, both in English and in Chinese from my interviewee.After I completed my interview, I was told I could start the next day.My working time was from 9am till 5pm Monday to Friday, but my boss (employer) told me I could come for work any time of the day and at least 3 working days in a week. I started my internship during early July 2014 in Shanghai, East Nanjing road station downtown of Shanghai city. I was provided my own office and taught the steps and procedures of what needs to be done in the office.

My first week task was to open a LinkedIn account and update my account so that I can search foreigners from different companies in shanghai and send them invitation information about any interests of joining our mandarin language school. I managed to send various connections with different foreigners in Shanghai and others in other cities that wanted to take the courses online because of the distance.

I was given various foreigner websites both in China and abroad that can use to market the name of our school and recruit people who are looking for one to one, group, or online courses for mandarin classes with a reasonable price. These websites that we used to market our school are such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, wechat, smartshanghai.com, flicker, blogger, shanghaist.com, craiglist.com, Instagram and many more others. Things like Facebook, YouTube, wechat and Instagram I needed to update everyday, at least once or twice a day, things like Phrase of the day, interesting videos about China, and education videos posting them online in Facebook and YouTube. Some of the days during the first week, I engaged with some outdoor activities with my colleague by going outside the office and distribute different various flyers of the school to foreigner passerby in downtown of shanghai, that way they can decide to contact us during their free time if they have interest in joining our language program either one to one, group class or online class. Our flyers had information about our school details such as phone numbers to call, address, our courses, prices for different course packages such us online courses/one to one courses/and group class courses per hour packages.

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Week Two.

Second week of my internship was smooth because I had got familiar with the procedures of the previous week. My second week task was to find any events going on in shanghai city, within any days of the week, so that I could attend then and socialize with various foreigners and know some of them, so as I can exchange business cards with people who I find are interested in settling in shanghai and also want to improve their Chinese language both in writing and oral level. Also for those people who are working in Shanghai and cant attend the classes in the school, but need a private tutor to teach them at their work place or home, we also can arrange for them to have home or work private tutoring with our qualified good mandarin teachers, but they also need to pay for their subway ticket price from their location to their destination and back, which ranges about 5-10rmb only.

During my visit to various international events in shanghai I met various foreigners from worldwide and faced various challenges with them such as, I found out that some foreigners are here as expats and they only here for short period time maybe 3-6 months or just a year. Some of the foreigners maybe already working in an English environment so they are not interested in learning and Chinese languages course at all. Some of the foreigners I also met in various occasions were here for only vacations and just travelling for fun as tourists so they had no enough time to engage in any language programs what so ever hence I couldn’t invite them.

Some of the foreigners maybe already engaged in different mandarin private school apart from ours and already started learning Chinese language before. Also other foreigner seems to already engage in University schools and already started learning mandarin as their one year language program hence they can not join any other private mandarin school. So I came to understand that it’s not that every foreigner you see in Shanghai is interested in learning mandarin, plus there is also market for many other private mandarin schools in Shanghai that are larger and been operating for a longer time compared to our new private school. As time goes on, I came to understand that nothing is easy in the beginning and things get better and better in the future.

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Week Three.

During my third week, my colleagues and I organized an activity in the school with the intention of inviting foreigners from various countries in Shanghai to come and participate for fun. By doing this we created some flyers and distributed them across major big events and near some streets where a lot of foreigners live or like to hangout. These flyers talked about the venue, date, and time of the event and included things such as learning how to make good Chinese dumplings, baozi and cooking some simple Chinese dishes, playing some interesting Chinese games with the teachers and other foreigners. All this was charged with a small amount of money of 200rmb including everything the whole day. Fortunately we got around 15 to 20 participants from randomly in the streets and various events that showed up and enjoyed our event hence this helped us to market our school and got more new clients who loved to enroll in our mandarin classes and start as soon as possible.We also have a few special trips we organize for our clients enrolled in our school; these include trips within Shanghai city and also outside Shanghai.We show our clients (students) around some tourist attraction centers in Shanghai so they may also study both in class and also in an outside environment by trying some few chinese sentences such as how to buy things, how to talk to people about directions, how to read the names of some places in Shanghai in mandarin pronunciation, and so many more. Our trips outside Shanghai most times are the day trips from morning and back in the evening, that we organize either by hiring a bus or bus a train ticket together to nearby cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nantong, and Changzhou. Visited the Hangzhou yellow mountains and many more traditional attractive places.

Our department not only was helping to enroll foreigners in mandarin courses but also we helped new foreigners to shanghai to find apartments places for rent. Shanghai is a big city and very difficult to find a place to rent with reasonable prices because life standard in Shanghai is pretty expensive compared to other cities such as Guangzhou. So we also help our clients (students) to search for good apartment owners with reasonable prices special for students level, fully furnished, either single, or sharing apartment, with bathrooms, seating rooms, dinning rooms, kitchen, washing machine, and Wi-Fi.

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This way we help our students feel at ease and don’t gain too much pressure in settling down in Shanghai as everything is being planned for them at their arrival to Shanghai.

Week Four

My final week in Shanghai, pretty sad, because I knew it was almost over and I need to get ready to go back to Guangzhou, but there are many interesting things I learned from my one-month experience in Shanghai. During my final week, I tried to do one more marketing method of visiting all 10-15 International Hostels in Shanghai that located in different places all over the city. I collected over 500 flyers and visited Hostel by Hostel (one by one) and asked the receptionist if I could place my flyers in their reception desk for visitors mostly foreigners to look through them and contact the details information on it if they are interested to join.

This was not an easy job we faced challenges such as some hostels did not allow to put any of these flyers without authorization. Also another challenge I faced is that, I found out that so many other private mandarin schools already presented their flyers in most of these hostels earlier than us hence we tried another alternative by giving some foreigners in person near the hostels, also by visiting some famous hotels and asking the reception for the permit to put the flyers and present them to foreigners as they walk in their hotels to help us promote our school.In less than a week I managed to know all the hostels in Shanghai and distributed everywhere plus during every evenings I would attend other social gatherings and get to meet new people and exchange ideas and market to them our school. My colleagues and I discussed about how to improve the school marketing strategy and recruit more clients to attend our mandarin institution and we came up with a plan of changing the website page from having many pages to open but to have only one long page with all information a foreigner would need to get about our school. Our new website is http://www.mandarinpi.com that replaced the old format, and we made it active last year on September 2014.

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Within the website we partitioned it according to Home page, Why Mandarinpi, Our Team, Courses & Prices, Gallery, and Contacts which includes the address of how to get to our mandarin Institution offices.

Internship experience.

Finally during my last days of my one month internship I learned a lot such as follows: it is not easy always to work for anyone or to do anything in the beginning but as time goes on you and your colleagues get alone well and things run smoothly without any difficulties. If we never face challenges, we can never learn our mistakes and know how to solve them in future, no matter what job position we take in our lives.Internships teach us a lot of things also how to keep time during work, sleep early, and wake up on time ready for work. This helps us to live in a stable life style of work mood and focus on what brought us to work for and avoid other destructions. My internship also taught me how to live and work with different culture, no matter the nationality or skin color or language. I had various colleagues such as from China, Mexico, Netherlands, Kenya, and me from Tanzania. Also I had to work with clients from all over the world of different nationalities that wanted to learn mandarin in our school, hence gaining a lot of intercultural experience. Doing marketing management also teaches you to learn to be patient and work under pressure no matter the environment you are in. The situation of moving from one place to another finding clients in different social events and incurring your own costs also taught me a lesson that, “You reap what you sow.” I was sowing client recruitments and reaping my salary and bonus percentage for introducing a client to our learning institution. Internship in a mandarin teaching Institution also taught me a bit of both oral and reading/writing chinese.

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Challenges.

There are a few challenges that a foreigner or a Chinese from another city will face when they go to live in a new city such as Shanghai. The few challenges I faced was; first of all, Shanghai is a big city, very crowded, and transportation seems a bit more expensive compared to Guangzhou, one station to another in Guangzhou metro costs 2rmb but 3rmb in Shanghai, the taxi meter in Shanghai starts from 14rmb during day time and 18rmb from 11pm at night but in Guangzhou the taxi costs 10rmb 24 hours a day.

I realized many foreigners living in Shanghai prefer riding bicycles or electric bikes to work from home as it saves time (traffic jam) and reduce costs. Another challenge I faced in Shanghai is residence troubles. First days in Shanghai it is difficult to find a place to stay because rent and hotels are a bit expensive unless you rent far away from the city center (1 hour distance by MTR metro ride) that is not convenient, so I had to ask a friend who could rent me an extra room at a cheaper friendly price of 40rmb per day and I paid him total at the end of my internship.

Another challenge I faced during my internship was the experience of working under pressure, working more than one job whereby I had other two/three part time jobs in Shanghai as promotion agent for different events in Shanghai city, which helped me to make some few cash that helped me to afford my basic needs and also socialize with various foreigners who some got interested to enroll in our teaching Institution.

The other slight small challenge I faced when I was in Shanghai is that I realized that people in Shanghai also have a native Shanghaies language so I had to improve on my mandarin and focus more on communicating with people

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more in mandarin and not having to learn Shanghai native language. So this felt like a challenge and motivation at the same time whereby I managed to live in a new city with new society and managed to improve my oral mandarin training everyday for one month period.

Suggestion to the employer.

Mandarinpi is a good teaching Institution growing from the bottom up to the top, but also they face a few problems that I have observed during my short period with them. I would advise my employer to first of all let the intern know through email about the payment methods clearly before they go for the interview so that the intern can know how much amount they can earn per month as an intern. This way it can motivate an intern to come and work hard and know that there is a small amount he or she will make without including the percentage commission from enrolling new clients to the Institution.

Also I would advise my employer to support their interns in some marketing ways such as; example I need to go and find some new foreigners in some special events in Shanghai that require an entry fee for every person who goes to this event, the employer should compensate back the money to his or her intern the day after because he or she used their own expenses and took their own time to go far away from their homes to an event that cost around 200rmb for entry fee. I also suggest that the company can hire more internship so as to gain more and more ideals from other people to help them with running their Institution and getting more clients for the school.

Mandarinpi should develop more bigger and open more branches in other cities so as to capture more market and

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expand its learning Institution in other cities in China as well, such as in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Qingdao and the other big cities in China with foreigners.Mandarinpi school of mandarin was a good experience I had in Shanghai, and no matter the difficulties and challenges I faced in Shanghai, I will still cherish the people I met in this Institution and thank them so much for giving me an opportunity for expanding my horizon and education experience within China in a beautiful famous city of Shanghai.

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