Somehow, classes start again next week.
I joined the company on June 23, though I was still juggling finals and came in on and off at first. It wasn’t until July 14 that I could fully commit to working in person. I stayed through September 11.
When I first arrived, everything was unfamiliar: the office, my coworkers, and the working world I was about to enter. I was excited, but also a little reserved and anxious. So much was new, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.
Looking back, these two months feel a little unreal. A lot happened, and I grew quite a bit. There were satisfying moments when projects moved forward, and confusing ones when I got stuck and had no idea what to do next. There were also plenty of times when people looked after me and helped me out.
Now that the internship has just ended, I want to write about it while the memories are still fresh.
01 | My First Workplace Lesson: Getting on the Same Page
Those early, occasional days at the office helped me get a sense of how the department worked and get to know the more experienced people around me.
I was in the customer operations center, where most of my senior colleagues were women. I felt a little shy at first, but everyone was kind to me, and being around them turned out to be much easier and more natural than I’d expected.
My first assignments were fairly standard operations work: writing copy, making posters, putting together plans, and documenting standard operating procedures, or SOPs.
One small project involved building an SOP for using AI to automate copy for WeChat Moments. The basic idea was to establish writing guidelines, give the AI past posts to refer to, and have it produce copy for new topics.
Before taking it on, I thought it would be pretty straightforward. Write clear guidelines, add some reference copy, tweak the prompt, and that should do it.
Once I actually started, it proved more complicated.
What kind of content did the business team want? Which phrases were acceptable? Why did the generated copy fall short of expectations? Each of these questions took repeated conversations, checks, and revisions.
I didn’t yet know that this process had a name I would hear again and again throughout the internship: alignment.
Circle that one. It’s important. It’ll be on the test.
02 | Knowing AI Opened a Few More Doors
Later, my familiarity with AI and a brief conversation with the department director introduced me to the role of a forward-deployed engineer, or FDE. More of my projects began to revolve around AI after that.
Honestly, getting AI to work in a company’s actual business involves some serious difficulties and sticking points. But the efficiency gains are real, too. There are good reasons for companies to adopt it.
The director was also looking to hire two AI interns, so I shared the recruitment poster on my personal WeChat Moments. Someone I knew happened to ask about it, and we’ve since become close friends.
For the remaining opening, I recommended another friend who also knew AI. Both passed their interviews, bringing the company’s AI intern count to three of us.
I really do feel that I’ve benefited from the opportunities AI has created. Knowing it and being able to use it gave me more chances to show what I could do. As those skills proved useful in actual work and people saw the value for themselves, their trust in me gradually grew.
Before my two friends joined, the director would ask me first whenever something involved AI: could we use it to do this? Based on my fairly limited understanding at the time, I would make a rough assessment. Working through the projects showed me that some things are still beyond AI, or that it doesn’t do them well enough. Those limits are there, though perhaps I still have more to learn. Some of it remains a black box to me, haha.
My strongest impression from that period was that AI is advancing fast, traditional companies have a real need to transform with its help, and AI becoming part of business seems almost inevitable.
03 | When a Project Stalled, Working Away on My Own Didn’t Solve It
One of my projects was to automate AI content production based on combinations of tags.
To be honest, halfway through, I even regretted choosing it.
When you keep hitting obstacles, can’t work out your next step, and see no clear way forward, your initial enthusiasm really does start to wear away.
All three of us experienced this. Talking about it later, we found that getting stuck on our respective projects was often what made us start doubting ourselves and losing motivation.
It makes sense. New projects come with plenty of unknowns, and there will always be a gap between how you imagine them going and how they actually unfold.
During this process, I also began to recognize how much I still had to learn about judging AI’s capabilities. Some things I’d initially thought were possible turned out to be beyond what my proposed approach could deliver. Sometimes there were technical limitations; sometimes my own understanding or skills weren’t there yet.
These two months showed me both how much time AI could save in real business work and how hard it could be to put into practice. An idea can sound useful while still having a long list of unresolved problems before the people doing the work can actually use it.
One particularly valuable lesson was to raise problems promptly when a project gets stuck.
Report the issue when it needs reporting. Set up a meeting with the relevant colleagues when you need one.
First, check whether you’ve misunderstood the requirements, whether everyone agrees on the direction, and what conditions or resources are missing. Then decide what to do next.
At first, I thought that once I’d been given a task, I just needed to put my head down and get on with it. Later, I learned that if the direction is wrong, you can pour in hours and still have to start over.
Getting on the same page early really can save a lot of wasted effort.
It’s a skill you rarely get to practice properly at university, yet need all the time at work.
04 | To Do the Work Well, Learn to Ask Clearly and Explain Clearly
Those projects also shaped how I think about the FDE role.
In this internship, at least, the core skill I felt most strongly was communication.
When you enter a new company, you need to quickly understand how its business actually works. Where do customers come from? How do their needs arise, and how does the team respond? What does the whole process look like? Which steps take the most time or are most likely to go wrong, and how does the company handle those problems now?
Then you need to dig further: how well is that part of the process working, and which metric do people actually want to improve?
If you jump straight into features and proposals without understanding these things, it’s easy to build a toy that makes for an impressive demo but can’t be used in the business.
When I arrived, I knew very little about the study-abroad business. After two months of working in person, I gradually understood the role our department played in the overall process.
Acquiring leads, getting conversations started, uncovering needs, closing sales; the four main business lines, the customer journey, tags in the social customer relationship management system, customer attributes. Terms that had once felt unfamiliar began to connect to concrete situations through the work.
There’s a considerable distance between knowing a term and understanding how it works in a business.
Beyond discussing requirements, another skill where I noticed real progress was giving updates.
The weekly Tuesday meetings and Friday department meetings were regular opportunities to practice. Listening to someone else present and doing it yourself are two very different things.
At first, I often stumbled and spoke vaguely. I seemed to have a lot in my head but no idea which part to say first.
Over the two months, I became more fluent and started to find a basic structure: where the work stands, what problems have come up, what I’ve tried, what I plan to do next, and what support I need.
But I still think the most important thing is this: you have to understand it clearly yourself before you can explain it clearly to someone else.
Organizing my thoughts beforehand worked far better than trying to think and speak at the same time in a meeting.
Our department took work seriously and held us to high standards. Honestly, the atmosphere in meetings could make me nervous. Sisi’s follow-up questions were especially challenging; she kept pushing you to think more deeply.
After a few rounds of questions, something I’d thought was “more or less sorted” would reveal plenty of gaps.
Those expectations were about the work itself, and I understood the emphasis on reasoning and evidence. The experience pushed me to think more carefully and reminded me that “I feel like…” often isn’t enough.
05 | The Things I Didn’t Handle Well Deserve a Closer Look
I did quite a few things over these two months. There were also things I didn’t handle well.
For a while, pressure from work and other parts of life piled up, and I wasn’t in a good place. It was close to the end of my internship, my project was still stuck, and I had few ideas about how to keep it moving.
Looking back, what I needed most was to speak up about the problems and difficulties sooner.
Instead, I kept them to myself. The more urgently I wanted to solve things, the harder it became to think clearly. The less progress I made, the more anxious I felt. It was a vicious cycle. After finally talking it through, I discovered that things were nowhere near as difficult as I’d imagined.
One morning, I came close to losing control of my emotions. Fortunately, I managed to calm down.
Reading more really does help. Please stop asking whether books still matter in the age of AI. Being able to keep yourself together when you’re about to lose it is reason enough. What you’ve learned can make you recognize, almost instinctively, that blowing up would be a stupid thing to do, and stop you from doing it.
That episode taught me something else, too. When you decide something can’t be done, you need to explain the reasoning behind that judgment.
Being able to state the limitations and the conditions you need is itself a way of moving forward. At least everyone can finally see where the problem is and discuss what to do next.
Simply saying “it can’t be done” does little to help others understand the problem or make the next decision. It’s just an emotional way of passing the buck.
Having feelings is normal. Judgments about work still need a rational basis.
06 | Working Across Departments, and the Small Things You Learn on the Job
Working with other departments deserves a mention of its own.
When you need another team’s help, it’s best to think through the request first. Why does this need doing? What problem will it solve? How much effort will it require from them, and what benefit do you expect?
They have their own tasks and priorities. Explaining the reasons, the effort involved, and the expected return helps them judge the request and makes collaboration easier.
I came to understand this gradually during the internship. I used to focus mainly on what I needed right now. Later, I started asking one more question: why should the other person spend their time helping with it?
There were plenty of other things I only really encountered once I started working.
Rules for invoices and reimbursements; purchasing, shipping, and distributing items; how to write weekly reports; collecting action items after meetings so they can be followed up next time; handing over work; completing the procedures for leaving a job.
Taken individually, they’re all fairly small things. But over two months, they added up to quite a lot of learning.
The conventions university doesn’t teach, but workplaces expect you to know.
07 | I Was Lucky to Meet People Who Were Both Serious and Kind
Finally, I want to properly thank everyone in the operations center.
They were serious and demanding about work, and warm and approachable in everyday life.
When I first arrived and barely knew the company, our senior colleagues looked after us. Allen and I were regularly supplied with fruit, snacks, milk tea, and cake. We were very well fed, haha.
After work, the other two guys and I would explore Hangzhou, eat together, talk about our future plans, and complain about whatever was holding up our projects.
Honestly, I think you really do need to let work stress out before it builds up. It affects your ability to think, and keeping a clear head under intense pressure is hard.
Maybe complaining about work is a necessary professional skill, too. Just kidding. Mostly.
The department director was easygoing as well. I’d had a few one-on-one conversations and meetings with them, and the whole experience was more relaxed than I’d expected. I didn’t feel nearly as stiff or hesitant talking to them.
Those small, everyday interactions left me with many warm memories of these two months.
Thank you to Jingjing, Sisi, Zhileng, Jiaojiao, Xitong, Weiwei, Xiaoyu, and every colleague who helped me along the way.
I’ll also miss working alongside my two good friends. I look forward to seeing them again.
All of this made me more certain of something: however capable AI becomes, sincere conversations and connections between people remain irreplaceable. Some moments become special because of the people who share them with you.
Two months isn’t enough to understand the working world completely. But it has given me a more concrete sense of what real work involves, and a clearer view of some of my strengths and weaknesses.
This article is mostly a record of my work, feelings, and reflections from those two months.
I hope some of it is useful to anyone about to start an internship or take their first steps into working life.
I’m lucky to have met you all this summer.
Thank you for looking after me these past two months. I wish you all the best, and I hope we meet again! And to you reading this, I hope things keep getting better for you, too.
