2019 Software Engineering international students visit Renren

School of Software Engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University has recently organized a visit to a Chinese company called Renren on October 29th. Seventy students had the privilege to be a part of this great experience and learn new things that can be useful to them in their future careers. This kind of visits are brought by their International Students Counsellor Jiaqi Sun, who is also their Chinese Culture teacher in the school. These students also have the opportunity to join the Social Practice class in which they can link what they are learning in school to a real-like job. This time, the visit had the chance to take place in Renren company.

Renren, which means « everyone » is a company that was founded in 2002 and was formerly known as the Xiaonei Network, which is a Chinese social networking service similar to Facebook. It is popular among college students. They can use it to communicate with each other’s.

Renren’s business consists of three main things: global investment, high end used cars business, and overseas SaaS business.

Before getting into a serious presentation, the employees gave the guests each a surprise gift and wanted to warm them up with a little funny game and gave the winning team a beautiful present.

Then, the students headed out to the presentation room where they focused on understanding the company’s overseas SaaS businesses. Here are some examples.

- Chime is a product they are currently working on. It is a marketing automation platform for real estate professionals which objectives are to come up with marketing solutions, provide a mobile phone application where agents can have access to the data anywhere, and enable them to personalize their own website. The goal of Chime is to transport its business to the American market, focusing on real estate agents in the United States of America.

- Lofty is a platform that was created two years ago. It focuses on small real estate agents to help them succeed and empower their real estate pros by centralizing marketing tools. They also want to break in the American market and help real estate beginners succeeding in starting their own business without failing.

- Trucker path is a trucking community with no less than 750.000 truck drivers as active users, equating to over 35% of all long-haul truckers. Their purpose is to make the « on the road » life easier, more enjoyable and more profitable for truck drivers. They are now working on offering new tools such as a navigation system, trucks stop information, and developing a better platform to communicate and share information. To do so, Renren needs engineers to help them with the data analysis which consist on collecting data and analyzing them. The main challenge of the platform is the competitors who try to steal their data.

- Make Everyday Lucrative: is a platform that comes from the success of Chime system. It is focusing on a real estate industry and trying to break into a bigger market in the United States of America with artificial intelligence and business intelligence technologies to run their marketing tools.

After the presentation, the students were informed that there were multiple opportunities for them to participate into a part-time internship or a full-time working job in Renren, either staying in China or being transferred to the headquarters of the company in the United States of America, in different post areas: Java coding, data analysis, product marketing and product managing.

Later, the students were escorted to have a tea-break where they were offered different delicious snacks. Afterwards, a quick visit of the company offices was authorized.

[Students:] After thirty minutes on the bus, we arrived at the company buildings and we were very pleased with their efforts to make us feel comfortable at the beginning when they welcomed us with gifts and planned a game for us.

We were also very interested because we could link what we do in class with a real-life job and understand how an engineer can help people in different fields on different continents.

We were mostly thrilled as we found at that the company has open positions for us and I think it is very convenient for us to have the school proposing us to visit companies where we can easily find internships. We really hope that we will have the chance to visit other companies while we are in China. 

At the end of the day, it was an exceptional opportunity for Software Engineering International Students to learn more about Chinese companies. The experience of it was very informative and pleasant at the same time.

Written by: Lilia Abderrafi

Edited by:  Juliette DANEL 

Photographer:   Lilia Abderrafi,Teacher Jiaqi SUN   

Checked and approved by: Teacher Jiaqi SUN