Day 3: Company Visits

When we first arrived at Cheetah Mobile, we all noticed the cheetah statues comparable to Google’s Android statues, also the building had a huge yard which seems to be very uncommon in Beijing. Cheetah Mobile’s CTO gave a brief description of what the company does and how it evolved over the years. We were given an opportunity to have a Q&A session the CTO where majority of the questions were business oriented, such as, where do you see the company in x number of years and why did the company’s stock drop these past few years. Two employees then gave us a tour of the office where they compare their workplace to “Silicon Valley”. During the tour, I asked one of the employees what language do they primarily use: Java, GO, PHP, and Java-Script(?). Someone then asked him how competitive is it to apply to Cheetah Mobile. He said it was very competitive; however, for us we have an advantage since we already know English so we can act as representatives for the company.

The next company visit was Microsoft. When we entered the building, there was a machine that would use facial recognition to guess your age, for our group it was a little bit on the high side. We were greeted by, I believe, the CEO for that specific office. He signed us in which then open a door hidden in the wall. He gave us a brief speech about the company and asked if we knew about the programs/projects Microsoft. I was the only one to really know about them, especially the Holo-Lens, which I have never used. After that he took us into a demonstration area where he showed off the “real-time” translator, drones, and the Holo-Lens. Since I was the only one to know about it I was the first one to use it. After the demonstrations, an employee took us into a conference room area that displayed real-time traffic in Beijing and other data about traffic, air quality, etc. He gave us a lecture similar to the one given to us yesterday.

To end the day, a small group of us decided to visit Tsinghua University, the school that Dr. Li went to. He said that Tsinghua University is China’s MIT. It was a beautiful campus and I was surprised by how many tourist were there. Francis, a person who worked with the our tourist program, told us that if we would have spent a whole day there we would only cover a corner of the campus.

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