Day 7- June 7: Hard Work Is Hard

Today was my first day working at Gung Ho! Pizza. What that really means is that I have to take a 45-minute subway ride, followed by a 15-minute walk into one of the smoggiest parts of the city. As bad as that sounds…. I loved every second of it. I love the city atmosphere. I love the way that you can get on a subway knowing where you are going and what you are doing and being one of over a million people on the same subway system. I love Sanlitun (the area where Gung Ho! is located). It has a western city feel, but no matter where you go street vendors, crazy taxi drivers, and an unknown language remind me where I really am. It is an awesome place to work. I arrived at Gung Ho! at 9:45 am and I was the first out of the group that I was supposed to meet to arrive. Today I was supposed to be guiding two other younger interns around to help me with my first project. The interns are named Alex and Harry and they are both in the 10^th grade at a prep school that churns out genius children as easy as Hershey’s makes chocolate. Rich had briefed me on our project the day before so I was a step ahead of the game. Carrie, a young Chinese woman from France is also part of the marketing team and she was going to help see us off that morning. After a short Skype meeting with Rich I went over our project again with everyone, it was kind of cool to be in charge of something on my second day, especially because John was listening to what I was saying as well. As cool as that part was, the work kind of sucked and it would best be described as mindless work with a twist of marketing. The gist of the project is that we went to the upper class shopping area about 5 minutes away, named “The Village” and asked individuals “Can you help me with something? What pizza delivery places do you know of in Beijing?” We would then record the data on a chart that Rich and I made the day before. If the interviewee responded with only Gung Ho! we would mark it as “dominant”, if it was the first they mentioned of many we marked it as “top of mind”, if it was mentioned in the middle we simply marked “mentioned” and it is pretty obvious what you mark for no mention. Our target market was individuals between the ages of 20-40. Alex and I talked to foreigners and Harry (because he could speak Chinese) spoke to native Chinese individuals. We would also record the individual’s sex and any other restaurant that they named. That was pretty much what I did most of the day from 11-4 am. Alex was a sweet girl and Harry was a goofy kid who liked Man U and we all got along just fine. It was easy to keep everyone on task and we did a decent job collecting data. Overall we received 65 responses and what felt like 20 million (the population of Beijing) rejections. When we got back Carrie helped me put our data in a spreadsheet and we were able to determine various pieces of information, that part was pretty cool. After that I called Rich and he told me that tomorrow we would do this again in the area where Gung Ho! is looking to put their second location and after that we would analyze the data together and he would let me present it at the next meeting. I kind of have that feeling that I am being tested and hopefully I am right. I am trying to do a good job on this project and hopefully the next one they put in front of me will have a little more responsibility. It is neat to start with something like this knowing that I have a chance to prove myself and possibly work my way up to larger projects. After making the long subway ride back to PKU Yuan took a group of us to play badminton. Yuan has claimed since the beginning of the trip that he is the top badminton player in his grade and in his department. He lived up to the expectations. He beat me 7-21 and everyone else who played against him faced similar results (even though he had not played in 3 months so he could concentrate on his thesis paper). Afterwards Rui and Yuan took a group of us to eat at Yuan’s favorite hot pot place. It was delicious! We ate a ton of food and I tried duck blood tofu…that was alright. When I finally got back I passed out immediately on my rock hard bed. It was a really long day and I am pretty sure that I was dehydrated after being in the sun for so long. Thank God I bought a 1-gallon jug of water on my way home!