Did the internship meet my expectations?
Currently, I’m back in Sweden, sitting in my student apartment where I, for not so long time ago, wrote my application for this internship. Time flies. My summer holiday is soon to be over and my last year at university will soon start. To be honest I can’t think of any better way to have spent my very last summer vacation than as an intern at Dynapac in China. Of course there were moments of loneliness and issues regarding the project and the communication to be solved, but these eight weeks have given me so much. I’ve gathered experience of how it is to work as an engineer, how it is to work at an international company, I’ve learned about asphalts machines, about mechanical design, about how it is to be part in an design team, how to interact with colleagues from a totally different culture with a different language, what a spider taste like and a lot more. As I wrote in my very first blog post, my expectations were high, especially within my personal scope. I believe these expectations to be met, I did my best and delivered a result which my supervisor was satisfied with. Furthermore the R&D manager and all the engineers seemed to be very thankful for my ‘English lessons’, which actually very much was a pleasure for me as well and a nice break from the project work.
In the past, I’ve been both travelling and working abroad and I must say working is the best way of getting to know the culture of a country as well as the people. The daily life in China was perhaps more different from my Swedish life than I pictured it to be. On the other hand the work situation was quite similar to what I believe is normal in Sweden. I’ve discussed this a lot with my colleagues and we concluded that the reason is that Dynapac belongs to Atlas Copco. Other domestic owned companies were operated in a very different way, often with longer working hours, a different organisation and even more pressure. The environment at Dynapac reminded me surprisingly much about the head office in Stockholm. The interior were decorated in ‘Atlas Copco blue colors’ as well as prints, flags, furnitures and of course Atlas Copco’s own dinosaur.
It was surprisingly how much cooperation the plant in Wuqing had with other Dynapac plants around Europe and the US, especially with the one in Karlskrona. The world felt very small when my colleagues shared me their stories about different things from their visits in Karlskrona and Stockholm and weakly I had to help different colleagues to translate documents from Swedish into English. I expected the Chinese language to be a great challenge, and in one way it was. For a daily chat or conversation my colleagues’ English was actually better than expected but when to handle specific, technical questions and discussions I sometimes felt the language was prolonging the project work, which I did expect and had planned for.
These eight weeks, alone in China have given me a perspective and the time and chance to analyse my own situation and future which I very much appreciate. I’m also very happy for the new friends and business contacts I’ve made during this summer as well as the opportunity to stay for ten days extra to travel and see even more of China. Through this trip me and Hannah climbed the Great Wall, and with that said I believe all my expectations of this internship to be fulfilled!
All the best!
/Julia