谢谢，再见 | Thank You & Goodbye
About the author: James Noh ’22 is an FSI Global Policy Intern at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, China.
Over the last two weeks of my internship at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy (CTC), my primary responsibility was to redesign event-related templates on Word, Excel, and PPT. Although redesigning templates was tedious work, I became more familiar with using Word, Excel, and PPT, which are practical workplace skills.
Outside of the office, I had an opportunity to visit Microsoft AI Labs in Beijing, where I learned about how Microsoft has developed artificial intelligence to develop a program that rates how good-looking people are, an application that uses machine learning to analyze and match a person’s face with similar celebrities’ faces, and a program that simultaneously translates speech among seven languages. At Microsoft AI Labs, I also learned more about the commercial, medical, and educational applications of virtual and augmented reality.
On the final day of internship, CTC interns and staff participated in a closing session in which interns gave feedback, both positive and negative, about the internship program to staff. After the closing session, interns and staff took photos before saying goodbye.
Although the internship officially ended, most interns, including myself, and a couple of staff spent a following week in Tongren, Guizhou, China as volunteers for the 2019 Yao Foundation (created by Chinese former NBA player, Yao Ming) Hope Elementary Basketball Camp teaching elementary school children from rural, under-resourced areas in China how to play basketball, solve a Rubik’s cube, and sort waste in Chinese. Throughout the camp, I taught kids how to sort waste in Chinese, and appreciated how attentive and excited the participants were despite sorting waste being a mundane class topic.
One day during the camp, after I finished teaching a class, I had the opportunity to connect with a group of participants from Shanxi province over lunch. It felt meaningful to share with the participants my background as a Korean-American who can speak Chinese because they had seen very few foreigners in their hometowns, including Americans of Asian descent like me who lived in a Western country yet looked similar to Chinese people and spoke Chinese. Just by being present at the Camp and speaking Chinese, I was able to not only give the participants a more broad and nuanced view of the world outside of China, but also gain insight into life in rural China, which is quite different from the life I had experienced in the bustling and global city of Beijing.
Through my internship at CTC, I not only learned about the role a think tank plays in foreign policy and society and its working environment, but also befriended CTC interns and staff and gained access to a network of CTC alumni who are well-positioned in various industries from finance and consulting to public service and academia. A huge thank you to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy (CTC) for making this rewarding summer possible!
