First Impressions

After my first 3 days, I moved into the apartment and currently live with another intern from Norway and a Chinese man from the process engineering department. As for Wison itself, the company is absolutely huge. The building I work in apparently has over 1000 workers, while the company overall has around 3000. I also quickly discovered that I am not the only intern here. Besides one other intern who is also through the Intrax program, there are about 15 other interns who work here in various departments. I am working in the HR department under a man who calls himself "Seven." Wison is located in the Pudong District of Shanghai, which is the eastern side.

I am currently on my 3rd day of work. Each day has been quite different and I feel that I am just beginning to have a better understanding of this company. The first day, I spent most of the time being shown around the building by Seven and Eleven, although a lot of time was also spent reading the internal magazine, "Wisoner," which has articles written in Chinese with near-perfect English translations. Essentially, these magazines have become a valuable study-tool for improving my Chinese for the many technical terms involved in a business such as Wison. Anyway, the second day, I discovered that they would like me to assist one of the senior Vice Presidents of Wison Engineering in practicing English. I have heard many other interns grumble about these kinds of jobs but in the past, I have discovered that it is essentially another opportunity to practice and learn Chinese. I quickly learned that the senior VP, Mr. Zhou, can speak very little English. We spent an hour and a half going over a PowerPoint from a previous meeting which outlined one of the building projects and was able to learn many new words myself all the way from "tu jian," which means civil engineering, to "xiao huo shuan," which means fire hydrant. After the mutual learning session, I had lunch with another intern and Seven. Since lunch is provided at the company, everyone tends to eat right at 11:45 when the cafeteria opens so it can be quite hectic. There are 3 food choices each day and so far they have been rather good. I am one of the few interns who are able to speak a decent amount of Chinese and so I find that it has been extremely useful in communicating with other workers. Many of them only have limited English, so my ability to communicate with them in Mandarin has helped me gain more of their trust.