Internship at TRUMPF in Shanghai - We live it

An Internship in another country is always an opportunity to see the world, to broaden your horizon, to gain new experiences and to find new friends. More and more students decide to study abroad for one or more semesters or to gain practical experiences overseas. The most popular country for those international stays is still the USA.

Our choice was different; we decided to go to the dynamic metropolis Shanghai in the East of China.

At the moment we are four interns who work for TRUMPF which is located in the center of Shanghai. We have interesting and important tasks which work on together with our Chinese and German colleagues.

The range of responsibilities is from designing and programming IT-Systems to gathering information for strategic decisions and to the organization and coordination of exhibitions.

It is very interesting to discover the cultural gap which still exists and to learn how to deal with it. In the same way it is great to realize that we have many things in common.

We are lucky to have very friendly colleagues that are always happy to help us to adapt to the Chinese way of life and to teach us some Chinese.

Beside the work you have to face a lot of other challenges while living in China. It starts with simple things like eating soup with chopsticks, getting into and out of the metro and ends with getting a taxi during the rush hour.
On the other side it is great to experience how the things get easier from week to week. You learn to get along with the differences and you start to learn some Chinese words which help you to survive and deal with the daily life.

It is also an amazing feeling to understand parts of a conversation between Chinese people and to successfully negotiate a price in Chinese.

The months over here pass by too fast as they are full of experiences which we will never forget. We learn how to deal with unusual situations and people with a completely different cultural and personal background. But the Chinese we meet are also learning about our culture from us so that both of us are benefiting from each other.

Internship at TRUMPF in Shanghai – we live it.

----written by Evelyn Konrad, former intern of TRUMPF Shanghai