More foreigners Select for Internship China

Elizabeth Newton，who is Stanford Graduate School of Business Deputy Director, says that more and more students select to look for internship China.

"The GMIX program at Stanford Business School encourages students to gain international work experience by spending part of their summer in China," she told China Daily in an e-mail interview.

"This holds true despite the financial crisis, as these fields of work in China are popular among our student body," she said.

Eric Hu, a human resources assistant of Drager Medical Equipment, said foreign interns are becoming more popular as more international companies are coming into China.

"As a German company in China, we need Western interns who could adapt to our company culture very fast," he said.

A lawyer surnamed Liu, of the Beijing-based Longan Law Firm, said foreign interns can make a Chinese company more diverse.

"Foreign interns bring broader minds to my work team to make strategic plans for international markets," he said.

"China had been the third largest economy (after US and Japan) in 2008, and the country needs more international diversity to develop further," he said.

However, the language barrier is one of the problems the foreign interns must tackle.

"I found it relatively easy to navigate outside of the office without knowledge of Cantonese or Putonghua. Inside the office, I found it would be a large advantage in the long run to be proficient in one of these languages," Lydia B. Jett, 28, an American MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told China Daily.

She worked in financial posts in Hong Kong and Shanghai as an intern the past few months.

"As the economy in the US was heading downwards, I thought China would be an interesting place to continue to see growth, though somewhat moderated," she said.

"As I applied for full-time jobs after graduation, my working experience in China helped me to better understand the dynamics of the economy and real estate development there, as well as to understand the important cultural differences between our countries," she said.

Internship Shanghai and Beijing are the most popular choices for foreign workers, and they also show interest in internships in Guangzhou or Shenzhen, according to a research of CIIC-Exp China.

And the research also find that 77 percent of foreign students prefer a 10- to 12-week internship program.   It is also popular among Chinese students.