SSPS students talk about their internship experiences

Every year, about 90 students from different programmes from the Department of Social Sciences and Policy Studies (SSPS) take up internships at various organisations, including environmental consultancies, construction companies, theme parks, hotels, social enterprises, government departments, social services NGOs, environmental NGOs, educational NGOs, cultural NGOs, and more.

In this issue, FLASS FORWARD interviews two of them, Travis Li Hong-chun, a second-year student of Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours) in Sociology and Community Studies, and Zoe Liao Erdong, a 2023 graduate from the Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours) in Global and Environmental Studies, on their internship experiences. They told us how the department prepared them to take up the challenges and what they have learnt from the internship.

 

Second-year, Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours) in Sociology and Community Studies (BSocSc(SCS))

Travis: I did my internship at the community recycling store run by the Christian Family Service Centre (CFSC) in Hung Hom (GREEN@HUNG HOM). It is one of the recycling service centres under the territory-wide GREEN@COMMUNITY initiative. My internship period was from early June to the end of July during the summer of 2023. It was around 200 hours of work.

There is a mobile GREEN@COMMUNITY collection point near my home. Passing the collection point every day, it fuelled my the desire to work at one of such collection points for my internship. As a student of sociology and community studies, I am always interested in observing people’s lives. Working at a recycling service centre also allowed me to closely observe how recycling business is operated. This is an additional attraction to me.

I provided help to the public who brought recyclable items to the store. These include helping them to put the items into the right collection bags or bins, register their redemption points on the redemption card or mobile apps, as well as giving out redemption items.

Travis: I definitely learnt first-hand about how environmental business operates. More importantly, the internship widened my knowledge about the community. There were quite a number of elderly people visiting the recycling store every day. They were happy to be able to trade in recyclable items for daily necessities and groceries like noodles, cooking oil, and tissue paper. The elderly like to talk to young people like me. I found that many of these elderly people actually collected plastic bottles and scrap paper off the streets. Some of them used trolleys to bring large amount of recyclable items to the store.

The recycling store I worked at is on Wuhu Street (蕪湖街) in Hung Hom. This is a relatively poor neighbourhood populated with elderly people. Dragging recyclable items all the way to the store under the sweltering summer heat was toilsome. All they wanted in return were some daily necessities. Not far away from the store on Wuhu Street is the middle-class district of Whampoa Garden. I found that the contrast between the poor and the wealthy is noticeably great.

As I needed to help folks in the neighbourhood, I had many chances to interact with them. Besides working at the store on Wuhu Street, I also worked at nearby mobile collection points managed by CFSC. There, I observed the community at an even closer distance. Some of the folks told me old stories about the neighbourhood. It surprised me that many of them came to my recycling store every day. Wanting to redeem items aside, their actions also showed their support for the recycling initiatives. They champion environmentally friendly ideas.

Travis: Besides knowledge about how to manage a green business and the community, the internship also trained up my skills to work as a team. At any time, there were many people taking recyclable items to the collection store. Workers there were required to handle enquiries. At the same time, we also needed to keep the store running efficiently, which means queuing people up, changing the recyclable item collection bags when they were full. As many people came to our store every day, we needed to work as a team to complete these tasks.

Luckily, there were other students from EdUHK who also worked at the same recycling store. I found that I needed to humble myself to work together with other teammates. I think this is the most valuable experience I got from the internship.

Travis: The intern work was manual in nature. However, as I worked on the frontline of helping people, I needed to have very good communication skills as well. People coming to the recycling store were eager to bring back what they wanted. But sometimes, redemption items were out of stock, and they couldn’t redeem what they wanted. We needed to pacify them and to make sure that their disappointments were duly addressed. This process required extra patience.

Sometimes, I worked at mobile collection stations where I met many South Asian and Putonghua-speaking citizens. Communicating with them really honed my language skills. It brushed up my confidence to speak other languages. All in all, interacting with people on the streets was very interesting. My communication skills were improved as a result of this experience.

Travis: In the beginning, I did it because it is a compulsory part of the course. But once I worked in the field, I found that the internship gave me a good opportunity to connect what I learnt at EdUHK and what I could see in a real-life situation. It helped me understand what a real workplace looks like before my graduation.

During my internship, I met many friendly interns from other local higher institutions. CFSC staff at the recycling store were very nice too. The supervisor of the store is from EdUHK. The atmosphere was congenial.

Travis: I appreciate that SSPS has a wide network of partner organisations for me to choose from. Because of this, I don’t need to spend time and effort to find one myself. SSPS also prepped me to take up the internship. The department clearly told me the different requirements for different jobs. For example, whether the internship is an office job or manual job, and the respective language requirements.

Just before landing on the workplace, the department arranged a briefing session for all interns, reminding us all the things we need to pay attention to when working in a workplace. For instance, how to communicate with your supervisor in your workplace. During the internship, academic tutor kept communicating with me through email and WhatsApp. Half way through the internship, the academic tutor came to my workplace to evaluate my performance with my supervisor.

The internship programme required me to ask my workplace supervisors to fill up one mid-term and one final evaluation on my performance. I also needed to submit a final paper about my internship. This helped me consolidate my reflections about what I have learnt from internship.

 

Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours) in Global and Environmental Studies (BSocSc(GES))

Class of 2023

Zoe: My internship was at The Harbourview in Wanchai where I worked at the environmental office of the engineering department. It was from June to August of 2022. I chose it because I wanted to learn how an in-house environmental team is run and the hotel has one.

As the hotel planned to apply for some green prizes, one of my major duties at the internship was to help write its 2021 Green Report as part of its environmental profile. I also needed to help prepare and give educational lectures on environmental conservation, like talks on air quality and food waste, to different teams of the hotel. Through these lectures, we updated the staff on the new trends and concepts in sustainability works and evaluated what different teams have achieved in their recent environmental works. This helped raise the hotel’s overall sustainability awareness.

I also took up the work of an environmental audit. For this, I monitored environmental factors like noise level and air quality of each floor of the hotel. During the internship, I assisted my team to prepare the hotel’s carbon audit report as well. As the hotel is firmly committed to sustainability, its carbon audit report adheres to Scope 3 standard of carbon emissions. That means we need to collect related information on carbon footprint not only about the hotel, but also regarding its supplier activities.

Zoe: I have acquired a great deal of knowledge in environmental studies from the BSocSc(GES) programme. However, it was the internship that gave me opportunities to apply this knowledge in the business world. At the hotel, I practiced in-house sustainability works and in-house environmental monitoring works. As such works involved many parties of the hotel, I learnt how to communicate and collaborate with different people. The internship taught me how to write business emails and how to effectively present my ideas in face-to-face meetings with my supervisor and other staff members of the hotel.

As the other teammate of my small three-member team was rather passive. I needed to take the lead in our works; another learning experience for me. I was overjoyed when my team head and internship mentor Mr Gary Chan, who is also a BSocSc(GES) graduate, praised me that my interpersonal communication skills have greatly improved by the end of my internship.

Zoe: It was physically challenging as I needed to spend almost two hours to travel to the workplace from the Taipo campus. To reach the hotel on time, I got up very early during the two months of internship. There was psychological challenge too. At University, I always have friends around me to share my joys and listen to me vent. But at the workplace, there was no such peer group.

Environmental office is managed by the engineering department. However, the head of the engineering department was pretty demanding. When I first landed on the intern job, I found it not easy to get along with him. Although it was tough to a student like me, it was also a blessing in disguise that polished my interpersonal skills and improved my emotional intelligence.

Zoe: Working at a hotel means I need to observe somewhat strict etiquette requirements. For instance, I needed to dress up formally, including wearing high-heels. When I saw guests at the hotel, I had to put my hands in front of me and bow slightly.

I remember that during a field trip organised by the hotel to an environmental facility, I wore a slightly revealing dress as it was quite hot on that day. The HR department reminded me after the trip that I should not dress too casually even during field trips. I quickly learnt that these are the standards of the industry that I have to follow.

Zoe: The internship taught me how in-house sustainability work is carried out. It also provided me an opportunity to practise how to apply knowledge learnt from EdUHK in a workplace. Those things I learnt from the BSocSc(GES) programme are theoretical. The internship allowed me to see first-hand how environmental theories were translated into action in the real world. I learnt how to fill the gap between classroom and workplace.

For instance, I learnt the different aspects of in-house sustainability works in waste recycling, electricity saving, and sourcing of eco-friendly products. It really broadened my understanding about saving water, electricity, and gas, and how to manage an energy-saving business. I also learnt how to write carbon report and green report. I think the internship offered me a pretty comprehensive exposure to the sustainability field and the hotel industry.

Character-wise, the internship helped me grow as a person. Overall, it was a very fruitful experience. I plan to seek job opportunities in the ESG consultancy industry when I graduate from my present master’s degree programme in environmental management. I think the experiences I garnered at the internship will help.