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In January 2020, two undergraduate Global Commerce Program students from Chinese Chamber member Denison University had a micro-internship with the Chinese Chamber.
During their winter break, Ellen Sipe and Jenny Xiong helped the Chinese Chamber with a number of tasks, including updating contact records, prorating membership invoices to fit the Chamber's new calendar-year membership cycle, collecting news items for our LinkedIn feed, and other tasks.
See what they did and learned here, in their own words:
Jenny Xiong
Being an intern at Columbus Chinese Chamber was a great experience for me. As an
international student from China, my biggest gain is exploring the connections between Columbus, Ohio and my home country. This is my first time to see the history of cross-cultural collaboration and connection; through the 6-weeks experience, I learned so many interesting facts of the city and Ohio, and how an organization like Chinese Chamber could help to promote communications for professionals and companies.
I learned... how an organization like Chinese Chamber could help to promote communications for professionals and companies.
Besides cultural learning, I got some useful tips that benefiting my future profession as well, such as how to search information for companies in a certain industry or field, how to help on the daily routine as an intern’s role; these are all wonderful for me!
Ellen Sipe
Being a college student is stressful enough without the chaos of Covid on top, so I was close to panicking when my major required an off-campus experience to graduate. My focus of study is East Asia and I had a pretty good feeling that I wouldn’t be traveling to China anytime soon. When the Global Commerce director at Denison reached out to me with an opportunity with the Columbus Chinese Chamber of Commerce I was so grateful to find a solution to not being able to study abroad.
Working with the Chamber of Commerce also taught me the importance of networking and connections.
This micro internship felt like it went by so quickly, yet at the same time I feel like I gained a much better understanding of the benefits corporations get from an interest in US- China business. I felt like I was able to actually contribute to the Chamber of Commerce by creating invoices and doing research on potential members. Working with the Chamber of Commerce also taught me the importance of networking and connections. I think that’s more of an intangible skill to learn that some students don’t get or even want to improve on. Seeing the connections provided by the Chamber of Commerce and the ways in which they facilitate growing them showed me how a career really depends on being polite and finding individuals with similar interests.
Overall I am very grateful for my time working with Pat, the Executive Director, I feel ready to finish my studies of international business at Denison and soon enough become a part of that world myself.