New Project on GlobalRencai

Besides my project for Shanghai Expo, I also participated in a project called GlobalRenCai. It is sponsored by former deputy mayor Joy Chen. Her idea is to create an online community for PRC students who study in the United States to find their right career in the States. Right now, she has a career blog, on which she writes all sorts of issues related to career.

Joy is a Chinese American, so she has this strong feeling of helping PRC students struggling for career in the U.S. She also has expertise in this area because she was in charge of human resources when she was working in the government.  Now she uses her knowledge and social connections to help the students.

I remember meeting her the first time at her house at the Venice beach. She and her husband talked with me about how I think of this project and what are the possible directions that it may go into. At that time, all she has was the blog and her exposure on some Chinese fashion magazines. No concrete plans for how to approach the PRC students, and no idea about the content.

GlobalRenCai Logo

But now, we have a team of nine people working on GlobalRenCai and we have already pulled off two focus groups and a comprehensive survey aiming for understanding the needs of the students. Click the link and fill the survey if you're a PRC student studying abroad. We set up a Renren page (Renren is similar to Facebook but in Chinese), partnered with other popular pages. Right now Joy’s page has more than 2000 followers and the number is still growing. We decided to hold events like social networking occasions, job information session, and career tips workshops, starting from University of Southern California.

Every person in the team has a special duty. My duty is to translate all her English blog posts to Chinese because she cannot read and write Chinese. I also manage her website by updating links, fix html problems, and do the tagging. I’m also the designer of the survey that is currently collecting responses from PRC students. We use Qualtrics and I must say, the survey is very sophisticated and well designed. We will use the result of this survey to determine the content of the blog and to better help the students on their career needs.

Wait and see what we will get is fascinating. I wish this project can really help PRC students to build a better career in the future and I’m enthusiasm about this.