KNOWLEDGE THROUGH INTERNSHIP. AN EXAMPLE OF COOPERATION BETWEEN A CHINESE MANUFACTURER AND A SWEDISH TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Since 2005, students from Department of Machine Design at KTH Technical University in Stockholm have annually been offered internship on a Chinese manufacturing company, located in Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, one of the fastest growing and most important industrial regions in China.
The purpose of the internship has on one hand been to provide Swedish engineering students the opportunity to get close to Chinese industrial conditions, to get to know Chinese culture at close and to give the students the opportunity to work with Chinese engineers and designers. On the other hand it has given the Chinese manufacturer an insight in how Swedish engineering students work and achieve new design proposals. Among students who have previously undergone the internship, several have ended up in positions in Swedish or multinational companies where they cooperate with Chinese companies or European ones in China.
The company with its 1.500 employees is diversified into several branches. One is being one of the main suppliers of ice cream and soft ice cream machines in China. The internship has mainly consisted of preparing new proposals for the design of the company’s products such as ice-cream machines, soft ice-cream machines and color tinting machines for the Chinese market, but also for the African and European market. This work has been conducted over a five-week period after the finishing of the ordinary semester at KTH. The result has given new proposals, one per group of two or three students; proposals that subsequently have gone into production and later on, within a six-months period mostly have been found as products in the Chinese market.
The internship has been organized by KTH in cooperation with the Chinese company. The draft schedule has been developed at KTH. After adjustments the staff of the Chinese company has approved the schedule. The schedule then constitutes as an agreement and a contract that ensures that the students’ work is supporting the pedagogical and educational goals of the education at KTH.
Students are preparing their visit by implementing either visualization projects associated with the products manufactured by the company or to implement a technical project based on a problem that they had been assigned earlier in the semester. During the internship accounts for a weekly diary of each group’s work is sent back to Stockholm. Finally each group will present a report of the completed project.
Since its start in 2005, a total of nine groups of students have been given the opportunity to make internship and practice their experiences at this Chinese industry. The Chinese company has from the very beginning shown a great openness and a great understanding of the academic rules that have to dictate the collaboration with the University.