Shanghai Yan’an High School (Graduated in July 2018)- School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University (Graduated in March 2022)
- Works at Dyson Technology Limited in Shanghai
Ms. Xu Ying, who is now working for Dyson Technology Limited in Shanghai, looks back her life at SILS. Our student, Lu Jingyao, has shared us the conversation with Ms. Xu Ying.
― It is a great pleasure and honor for us to have Ms. Xu Ying who is taking the interview as a SILS graduate. Xu Ying has graduated in 2021. In her senior year, she mainly studied Kantian ethics in her advanced seminar and gained the undergraduate degree in three and a half years with outstanding academic achievement. Now Ms. Xu Ying works for Dyson Technology Limited in Shanghai. And as is well known, Dyson Company is a technology company that offers design and manufacture of household appliances. Indeed Xu Ying was quite attentive and persistent in both the field of study and in workplace. Today we are very pleased to have Ms. Xu Ying here to describe for us her experience as an employee of Dyson and the circumstances under which she undertook the career in e-commerce after the study in SILS. So probably we will start with this question by asking Xu Ying what is Dyson’s working environment like? What kind of work does your job entail?
First, thank you very much for this invitation. Actually, I started my job in Dyson from this April, so in the first half year I was mainly doing media planning on Wechat platform, which is a Chinese business platform, and now I’m doing media planning on Tiktok.
― And here we would like to find out more about your reasons for choosing this job. Was it a smooth onboarding process? Have you faced any challenges entering the workforce?
I started my job hunting from 2021. That’s one year before. The reason why I chose Dyson is that first, Dyson is a very famous company. Its international atmosphere really attracts me a lot.
And second, China has a very big market for E-commerce, so this job in Dyson also provides us with chances to experience some technology and new information on these platforms, making us know Dyson more, in the meantime telling us what the new trend is and how the Chinese E-market has developed.
So to conclude, it’s not only about my interest, but also is related to do the potential trend of E-commerce in China and in global markets.
― Based on what you have talked about, for me I think you already have a clear planning of your career path as well as a solid knowledge of what your career is about. We tend to think that the process of career-planning is an opportunity to identify our personal strengths and interests, so then is there anything in your current job or your career plan that particularly satisfies you?
Yeah. Although I just started my work for less than one year, there are really many things that make me feel satisfied. For media planning, we need to post the advertisement on platforms like Wechat and Tiktok, but we got lots of these advertisements and materials of them from the global department of Dyson, which might not fit into the Chinese market. So now we are doing “pilot”, which is to re-edit these materials so that they could be more suitable for Chinese customers. Since the click rate shows whether the customers find the videos that we create attractive, this would help us to readjust our advertisement. This is something that the global department has never done before. And to achieve such a work, we have to do some cross-department cooperation.
― Another thing that makes me curious now is that looking back on your four-year’s study at SILS, do you think learning at SILS relates to your current career path? And how are they relevant?
Taken in front of Okuma Auditorium on the day of Entrance Ceremony for September enrollees
Of course they are relevant. In SILS, the courses I took were mainly about politics and philosophy. In my last two years in Waseda, I was taking Professor Nagasaka’s seminar. I must say that learning politics, philosophy, and other history classes makes me feel that my mind has been broadened. I used to think about things from a very limited perspective, but after taking these classes, I know how to think outside the box better, trying to see the problem from different perspectives.
And in terms of my study in SILS, as it is a strong international atmosphere, it teaches me not to stick to one, single opinion. One should be willing to embrace different opinions. So I would say education in SILS really helpful to my career now. It also helped me with my jobhunting for I had more courage to try many things.
― According to your description, your study at SILS indeed has some influence on your current job. So do you have any message for the entrants for SILS as well as the prospective applicants for SILS?
I want to say that SILS is a very great school for everyone to apply. For me, one of the characteristics of SILS is freedom, not only about the freedom to choose courses, but also about the freedom that everyone can hold different opinions, that one can embrace different culture by meeting students from different part of the world. Based on this freedom, I hope we can have the passion to know ourselves, which is a very important topic during our lifetime. People might change as time goes by. So never stop finding what we really want, and be true to ourselves, because whether we can manage to plan our life is also related to whether we clearly know what we want. So I hope that reflection can become a habit in the four years of study.
― Thank you for sharing us with an exuberant description of your experiences as a SILS graduate and of course as an employee of Dyson. To conclude, Ms. Xu Ying has pointed out again that on career planning and also on life at workplace, a multi-perspective should serve as a center piece. I believe that such an ability of perspective-taking is closely related to her study in SILS. Thank you.
This content is as of the time of issuance.
