2015 Summer Intern: Mike

Mike

Mike Blood, a rising senior from UVM participating in CET's Shanghai summer program, came to AllSet Learning as a near-total beginner in Chinese. Fortunately he was willing to be our guinea pig, though, and not only did he learn a lot of Chinese during his internship, he also gave us a lot of insight into the absolute beginner's perspective.Mike helped a lot with the lower levels of both Chinese Grammar Wiki and the Chinese Pronunciation Wiki. He was also able to apply his notable Excel skills to more than a few tasks, and gave us a ton of needed help with our social media marketing outreach.Mike's account:

Coming to China and being an absolute beginner in Mandarin was pretty unsettling. Working at AllSet Learning has allowed me to practice my Chinese and start learning how to have conversations. My teachers, Weiwei and Chen, have been very encouraging throughout these past two months. We would try to get to know each other in Chinese which inspired me to ask and learn more vocabulary terms. I loved teaching them new English phrases while I learned Chinese from them.My internship here has given me an opportunity to gain experience working on various tasks. These ranged from advertising products, to market research, to teaching lessons, to website design, and more. John has been very supportive in having me help out with some problems that the company was facing and made me feel like my opinions mattered about these topics as we discussed them. The time I spent here has been very valuable because I learned to work both on my own projects, and in a group collaboration.Thank you to everyone at AllSet Learning for making this summer unforgettable! My time in Shanghai has been a blast and I now feel ready to take on anything back in the states!

Thanks, Mike! We'll miss your humor and your unrelenting "absolute beginner's perspective." (We welcome you back anytime, even if you're no longer a total n00b at Chinese!)