What is it like being an intern at oneof the most successful tech companies in China? For Vivian Wong, one of thesummer interns at Alibaba, it helps her step out of comfort zone and reinforcesher decision to do a PhD after graduation.

Departing from Stanford University,Vivian journeyed halfway across the world to Hangzhou for theZIERIP program, which gave her the opportunity to act as a researchintern in the City Brain Project at Alibaba Cloud.

Launched by the School of SoftwareTechnology, Zhejiang University International Education-Research-IndustryProgram (ZIERIP) is open to master and PhD students from top universities inthe world.

ZIERIP integrates academic and culturaltraining at ZJU with a 10-week internship at top tech companies in China. It isthe first time that the University has developed such program with its partnercompanies. The internship that the program provides aims to bring talentedyoung people from around the world into Chinese tech companies— not as a pathto a future job at the company, but as a way to experience the corporateculture firsthand and take the thoughts and inspiration back for their ownfuture success.

Alibaba Group, the world’s largestretailer, attracts and amazes the international interns, thus becomes the maindestination of their internship.

“Before I came here, I knew it was a bigcompany, not only in China but also (it was) very popular and prestigiousworldwide, so I think it would be a good opportunity for me to both see theculture of China and work in this big internet company,” said TheodoulosRodosthenous, a PhD student in statistics at Imperial College London, whostepped on the land of Asia for the first time in his life.

Internship at Alibaba isn’t a sinecureby any means. Alibaba group allocates the interns pursuant to their academicbackgrounds and interests to the essential departments including Alibaba Cloud,Damo Academy, and many others. These interns are required to be highly involvedin the projects and tap into their potential.

Theodoulos, for example, has to performa variety of tasksfrom developing scalable Graph Embedding techniques in JAVAand Apache Flink for streaming data to optimizing algorithms to reducecomputational complexity on big data. Another intern, Vivian, is currently incharge of adding Q-learning and implementing reinforcement learning techniquesinto the traffic signal control algorithm.

YU Liang, Vivian’ssupervisor at Alibaba, gave very positive feedback on her performance.“Her workwill definitely benefit us in the long term,” said YU. “Our team has alwayswanted to start optimizing the traffic signal control system. And since Vivianhas the background of civil engineering and continuous interest for this area,we allow her to take the lead and let her surprise us.”

Though the working environment atAlibaba is fast-paced, the overall vibe is still vibrant and inclusive. “Youdon’t see many hierarchical situations here. Everybody is pretty young andchill,” said Wanliang Tan, a PhD student from Stanford.

Starting from the mid of July, theinternship still has four to five weeks to go. The whole ZIERIP program, whichincludes lectures, cultural experience and internship, has left anunforgettable memory for participants.

“I would definitely recommend it toanybody who's interested in it,” said Vivian. “This is a really enjoyablelearning experience. When you come here, you really get to learn a lot ofthings, because it’s highly likely that whatever department you get into, itmay probably be very different from something you’ve been doing at school.”