When I was younger I had the opportunity to travel to China with my family. Those brief moments ignited my fascination with China, and I knew that one day I would come back. Last year after finishing my Bachelor Degree in Communication Systems at EPFL in Switzerland, I finally got my opportunity, and so I decided to find an internship in the Middle Empire.
However, after months of research and hundreds of none-answered e-mails, I started to realize the difficulty of finding a Chinese company that would hire me. Nevertheless, after a quick exchange with swissnex China about what I was looking for, I received a list a 3 new contacts. To my luck, one of them decided to hire me.
Moving on, I ended up in China at the end of August for a 8-month internship at a cloud computing startup located in Beijing, China’s capital city. The company is called Eayun, and is currently focused on building B2B cloud computing solutions for the Chinese market based on open-source projects. Two weeks after my integration into the R&D department, I was already working on core features of the main product of the company.
Moreover, being the first and only foreigner in my team was an amazing cultural experience. I couldn’t hope for a better situation for the improvement of my Chinese. Experiencing Chinese-life from the inside taught me a lot about how important diversity is in the workplace as well as in social life. My own insights helped my colleagues understand a perspective that they weren’t used to. Even if we suffered through a language barrier, there is no measure of growth to be had when you are learning from someone who is different from you.
As you can see, even though this experience working at a Chinese startup would not have been possible without the help from swissnex connecting me to useful contacts, it was my initial interest in China that compelled me to persevere through the hardships of finding a job. This motivation allowed me to live out this extraordinary experience in which I was able to meet many amazing people. Needless to say, I can’t wait to come back.
Written by Lucas Vandroux (冯凯), Eayun Inc.