What happens when you take a 19 year old from Canada that doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin, has never eaten any Chinese food, can’t “cook” anything other than Nutella sandwiches, and drop him in Shenzhen?
I’m not sure, but I’ll share my findings with you as I experience them.
But before I continue, let me give you some more background. I just finished my second year of a finance degree at the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) and am interning at Oriental Harbor Investment Management (OHIM) for the month of May.
I’ll split these posts up into 3 sections: Life, Work, & Travel.
Life
My first night here I decided to go to Shekou Wal-Mart (yeah, Wal-Mart really is everywhere) which is conveniently located barely 5 minutes away from my apartment. With my RMB in hand, I felt ready to begin my acclimation process with a seemingly beginner level environment. I figured I’d pick up some breaded chicken, fruit, and really anything I’d need to learn how to cook – how hard could navigating Wal-Mart be?
I had grossly underestimated my opponent – Chinese Wal-mart won the first battle. Defeated, I left carrying the only three things I felt I confidently understood: bananas, milk, and potatoes. (Disclaimer: my grocery shopping skills are non-existent). Even that was a struggle, I stood paralyzed at the checkout for several minutes as the lady tried to explain to me (as I later learned) that the bananas needed to be weighed and tagged. The Wal-Mart experience does a good job of encompassing the struggles I’ve had so far – everything has been more difficult than I expected.
That being said, things have started to fall in place and I now feel much more comfortable than I did that night. Our apartments are very nice, Shenzhen is incredibly clean and the architecture is beautiful, and the presence of other interns has made life much easier. I’ve liked nearly every Chinese dish I’ve tried, and have picked up a couple helpful phrases in Mandarin – mainly: “I can’t speak Chinese”.
Work
For those interested in Finance (as I was when researching the CRCC program) – I’m working essentially in an equity research role with the other analysts here, OHIM is a Chinese Hedge Fund. The building I work in is very cool, and my supervisor – who got his masters in the UK – is extremely helpful and engaging. My project was to either provide analysis on either a US stock, or try my hand at a Chinese stock, which if they had an office in Shenzhen I’d be able to go and visit management with my supervisor. I opted to go with the latter.
Travel
My travels so far have been limited to Shenzhen. The other interns and I have been to Sea World (no not what you’re thinking) which is a trendy area with cool bars and a huge cruise ship, along with a really cool park for our community outreach event. The event was an interesting experience – we supervised children that we couldn’t really communicate with while making “leaf art”.
Everything about this internship experience is an experiment for me – including blogging. I should’ve structured this post a little more as I’ve run out of space, but I’ll try to do better next week.
