The real reason I'm here

USA Pavilion at Shanghai Expo Internship

The University of Memphis's International MBA program requires an internship and a study abroad experience in the country you're specializing in. Thanks to Hans and Mark, two of my supervisors, I was given enough documentation to motivate the head of my IMBA program to let me work at the Shanghai World Expo. They gave me a letter to pass on to Dr. Kedia which detailed my duties and said I would be very valuable asset to the USA Pavilion, and that I would get to work for the CFO of Deloitte and Touche Shanghai!

I'm going to begin blogging about my internship now, because Dr. Brain Janz is the advisor for my internship project and has made that my assignment. Here is the introductory page with a summary thus far. Enjoy!

My internship during the summer of 2010 was in Shanghai, China at the Shanghai World Expo; while there, I worked in the finance department of the USA Pavilion (USAP) under CFO Ma Jun and his assistant Emily Huang. The USAP is a unique pavilion at the Expo, in that it is solely sponsored by private corporations (such as FedEx) and a handful of states (such as Tennessee) and cities, whereas many of the other pavilions, many of which represent individual countries, are partially if not totally government sponsored. Representatives from each of these American cities, states, and companies signed contracts detailing their contribution details, and each of these contributions needed to be recorded in financial statements with backup documentation. Some of the pavilion sponsors donated in VIK contributions, which also required documentation proving receipt and showing where primary usage was to take place. My major task during this internship was to locate, translate, organize and record these documents for financial purposes. This also required research and bilingual communication with Mandarin Chinese speaking customer service representatives, supervisors, and other contacts within the various sponsor companies and governments.

Several recurring tasks required work on my part and that of my fellow SAs who worked in finance: calculating and disbursing weekly SA stipends, calculating, organizing, and verifying expense reports submitted by staff members who traveled in search of sponsors and stayed in hotels; used taxis and purchased food items, all documented on receipts in Chinese characters; reviewing contract information in order to verify contribution amounts; itemizing and paying recurring bills such as company phones. All of these assignments required extensive spreadsheet calculations and documentation of receipts, mostly in Chinese characters.