When I thought about going to China to do an internship the first time I thought I could handle it all by myself. How difficult can it be to find an internship and to book an apartment. It wasn’t such a big problem to find some internship opportunities in the cities I wanted to go to: Beijing, Shanghai.
But after I’ve found some places I could send my application to, I could face a lot of problems: what happens if nobody understands me, am I able to organize some language classes by myself, will there be anybody I can talk to in English, how is that whole Visa procedure working, how can I find a host family and what if I’ll have problems with them?
At that point my Chinese teacher told me about that internship agency called InternChina. First I was a little bit skeptical. I didn’t even heard about a city called Zhuhai before. But instead of spending hours, days and weeks for research where to work, where to live and where to learn Chinese without knowing anybody, it took me a few minutes to send an application to InternChina and a few weeks later I was already there.
Since I’m here I realized that the biggest problem is not the whole organization to get an internship and to find a place to live.
What are you doing when you come to a new city where you don’t know anybody? Thank god, that was no problem for me- I got a list with over twenty contacts from other interns, I was invited for dinner to get to know everybody. So I felt never alone since I am here.
What are you doing when you come to a Chinese company or family, without knowing the culture and the language and when everything is so different? Then you have a lot of people from InternChina taking care of you and helping you to understand the Chinese culture. You easily can get language classes and a city like Zhuhai you are able to practice your Chinese skills everyday.
Will they treat me good there? Of course, because every single Host company as well as every single Host company has a good contact to InternChina. So if there is any problem there is always somebody there to help out.
What to do if the Air conditioner in your apartment is broken? Sleep in a sauna for the rest of your internship? Trying to call somebody to get it fixed (first find out who that somebody is) and determine that you don’t understand anything? Well, this is not that bad- just ask friendly for help from the InternChina team.
What to do if nobody understands me? Ok, you have to live with that. Just don’t spend such a long time for organizing alone and learn Chinese instead.