Experiencing new places, new jobs and new challenges, a batch of Hong Kong interns have to come to grips with a new culture, as well as a warm welcome from Zhejiang, Li Sixiao reports.

Lam Yuen Yee has been trained to field inquiries about financial products and treasury bonds. What the 21-year-old was not prepared for when she signed up as an intern with the Hangzhou branch of Shenzhen Development Bank was questions about her accent. “Sometimes customers question my pronunciation when I talk in Mandarin,” she said. “So I have no choice but to explain that I come from Hong Kong, which is when they become really curious and start asking a wide range of questions, such as ‘Why you are here?’”

Lam was selected as one of the 79 students from five Hong Kong universities for their summer internships in Zhejiang province. The summer internship program is one of the important follow-up activities of the third Zhejiang-Hong Kong high-end services personnel recruitment summit. “Through the platform that this program has provided, the 79 Hong Kong students will become more familiar with the province, and cultivate an interest in working in Zhejiang in the future,” said Qian Kai, deputy director of the Zhejiang Talent Market Management Office.

Like many of her peers, she was eagerly anticipating living beside the picturesque West Lake and dealing with the challenges of working at a State bank. Lam, who serves as an assistant to a financial manager, said it required a period of adjustment to get used to all the bureaucracy required for simple banking transactions on the mainland. “The process of applying for a credit card here is quite long and tedious,” she said.    

Meanwhile, the lines of customers at the bank would not be so long back home due to the soaring popularity of online banking, she added. However the leisurely pace of life in the city, and the friendliness of the people she encounters on a daily basis more than make up for the drudgery of some of her workload, she said.