Aug 3, 2017
As a rising senior, I wanted to spend my summer interning to gauge where my interests lie in the workforce. I also love travelling, believe summertime is adventure-time, and didn’t want my Mandarin to become stale away from the classroom. So, I’m delighted to be in China as a tourist seeing glorious sights while feeling like a local working, chit-chatting with locals, speaking Chinese, and riding the bus. Even though HCSIP is defined as a program that offers students both immersion in China and a valuable internship, I anticipated one aspect to be compromised, but it’s beautiful that neither has.
I’m interning at Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). It is a biotech firm, but we’re fortressed by mountains and joke that it’s an organic farm because of its well-maintained growing patches, large pond, casual flamingos, ducks, parrots, and endangered black swans just hanging around. As the world’s largest gene sequencer, the company has many fields of application: cancer research, agriculture, aging, and drug discovery to name a few. They’ve even been pig cloning since 2014! I’m stationed in the hereditary disease department cleaning genetic data and running stats to see which kids are likely to develop illnesses like epilepsy.
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/BGI-office-small-768x576-1.jpg)
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Office-flamingos-768x576-1.jpg)
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Office-pond-small-768x576-1.jpg)
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Office-pond-2-small-768x576-1.jpg)
With two weeks left, I anticipate it to be the simple authentic day-to-day life and culture in China that I’ll miss most: the countless small restaurants that open onto the street and create a chill, safe street feel; my daily purchase of Asian fruits; the sight of bamboo steamer baskets, pagodas and general Chinese architecture; Chinese bakeries; middle-aged men publicly rubbing their beer bellies accentuating its spherical shape as they rock the crop-top look; babies in split pants exposing their bare bottom; a morning cup of hot milk; the efficiency of China; riding the cheap and convenient public transport; trying different local dishes; and the long 5:00am-11:00pm opening hours. Not to mention the humidity-induced-sweat that quickly transforms you into a cloud raining droplets beneath you and daily fighting gluttony with China’s ridiculously cheap prices – full meals for $1 or $2, egg tarts for 50 cents, and buns for 15 cents.
Most blissful of all has been travelling on the weekends: exploring China, seeing relatives, climbing mountains, watching green scenery pass by at 350km/hr on the high-speed train, and reuniting with the other Harvard China Fund interns that you become super fond of and admire from the first week (“Orientation Week”).
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Huangshan-2-768x572-1.jpg)
![](https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Huangshan-4-768x576-1.jpg)
This blog post was written by Jing Leung, Harvard College Class of 2018, and participant in the 2017 Harvard China Student Internship Program.