Name: Ms. Rakuei Yoh
Country: China
School: Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics

Q: What made you sign up for the internship program?

I wanted to find out what I was lacking. There are a lot of different skills one may want to put together to go out and work in the real world, and I felt that my skills aren’t quite enough. Since a lot of these things are things I can’t learn in class, I decided I would discover my weak points by actually working in a company.

Another reason was that job hunting in Japan is different from job hunting in China. Since I’m hoping to work in Japan in the future, I thought that as a non-Japanese person, this would be a good chance to study the job hunting process here, and that I had to try something new, even if I wasn’t able to pass the screening process.

Q: What made you choose the company you did for your internship?

At school, I’m majoring in digital media, and I’ve taken courses in software programming. In my graduation seminar, I’m focusing on anime production, but I didn’t want to forget the other things I’d learned, and I also wanted to understand the content creation industry in another country.

I also really liked the sightseeing websites made by the company where I interned. I wanted to see what the office environment was like for a company with that I thought had good design sense and original promotion techniques.

Q: What did you learn through your internship?

I learned how to collect information from my daily life. I started to examine the user experience of websites I visited, and to look at advertisements I saw with a more critical eye. I started to think more about how shops plan and put out marketing campaigns.

Until now, I had never really thought much about marketing strategy, but I think my perspective has broadened since doing this internship, where I had to operate social media accounts and improve web pages.

Q: What was the most interesting thing you did during your internship, or talked about in your conversations with coworkers?

Looking at schedule outlines and the task chart.

The series of tasks to be completed until the final release are written out in detail in advance. Status updates and points to be altered were put into a shared schedule so that nothing would be missed.

Q: Please share a message for students who do an internship in the future!

With an internship, I think expressing your thoughts, and the experience of being at a company are much more important that whether or not you can learn a new technique, or whether or not you’ll be paid. You’ll be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and by watching the other employees work, you’ll be able to tell whether you can contribute with your skills. An internship will help you in your job search, and you’ll become able to talk about a real work experience that you’ve had: you have everything to gain by participating.

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Kyoto is an ancient city that welcomes many tourists every year, but it is also a city of cutting-edge technology, offering many opportunities to students studying abroad here.

Daily reports are submitted throughout the internship program, and once the program finishes, students who interned at a variety of companies will gather together to report on their experiences.

Students will not only experience working at a company, but will receive feedback, to help them further improve their skills.

Study Kyoto plans to announce details of this year’s program around May, 2018. We will also send out information via our email newsletter. Sign up to make sure you don’t miss your chance to apply!

Study Kyoto’s job-hunting site for international students provides students with up-to-date information for “shuukatsu” events in Kyoto!
Check it out! (Website is in Japanese only)
International student employment information portal site 「Beyond Study Kyoto」