When corporate experience encounters with Guanghua's thoughts,

When the wisdom of professors collides with the inspirations of fresh blood,

When enterprises, professors, and students assemble in the IPP,

What kind of story will be created?

What outcomes will they produce together?

Today we are going to share with you

Testimonials for 2020 Guanghua School of Management MBA IPP @ByteDance

Part 1: Testimonial from Enterprise

It is a great honor to be part of the Integration Program. It was a very valuable experience to an enterprise. Professor Ren Fei and students from Guanghua are pragmatic and rigorous. The brainstorming brought us new perspectives and new thinking. We hope we could get more opportunities to participate in the programs launched by Peking University.

ByteDance assigned two instructors for each of the two groups, matching our current innovation and key programs. Workshops were held every Sunday. We introduced our platform, product matrix and marketing for Tiktok to students and brought in perspectives from products, marketing and planning among others. We also discussed research direction and feasibility.

Professors and students from Guanghua also brought us many new perspectives. They share with us their research results and innovative approaches to marketing. The students’ study could be helpful to improving our marketing strategies. Some plans will also be integrated into our projects and demonstrate their value in practice.

Part 2: Testimonial from Student

Team Name: Guanghua Dongci Daci

Team Members: Wang Haoran, Li Wei, Liu Zunchang, Wang Shuoyang and Yu Meisi

My first impression about ByteDance was that it was an Internet company on a fast-pacing 996-schedule and the maker of a series of viral short-video platforms. Through the Integration Program, we had a close contact with the ByteDance team and found that they are lovely, dedicated and creative. The culture of diversity advocated by ByteDance and the vision of taking on the mission impossible are in line with that of our teamByteDance is a great company. As people thought the era of monetarizing Internet traffic was about to end, ByteDance emerged and broke the market landscape dominated by BAT. It was very hard. Through a field trip to the company, we had a full understanding about its line of products and development history. Its openness and efficient way of doing things, which we learned during the communicatios, made us realize that its success was nothing accidental.

The research subjects in this Integration Program are not related to our majors or working experience. We explored a totally new sphere and a new company. Thanks to the help of instructors from the company and the school, as well as our joint efforts, we came up with creative ideas and verified them in a meticulous way; we fought for the same goal. And the process was great and valuable. After this practice, we knew how a giant project was built from scratch. It needed to tackle various preliminary challenges, focus on details, and carry out team work and full communication so that a solid foundation can be laid.

I have two words to describe the courses of the program. They are “new” and “gain.” Saying “new,” I mean cultural tourism is an area I barely had knowledge of. Everything was new, and everything was unknown. I was lucky to have a chance to embrace the unknown and experience new things. Thanks to the cultural tourism project, I had my vision broadened and got an opportunity to see the sector from the perspective of a layman. This inspired more thinking on the common and distinctive features of different industries. Saying “gain,” I mean I made new friends and got valuable knowledge through the program. Our team discussed the project late in the night and improved our draft day and night. The passionate brainstorming and presentation showed how we loved and dedicated ourselves to the project.

We were lucky to have a chance to explore the cutting-edge and the hottest industry amid the epidemic. This prompted me to have new thinking about my future career choice. More importantly, it gave me a chance to meet talented and dynamic friends from the team. We were like a team starting a new business. We were classmates and fighters for the same battle. I heard a lot of stories in which schoolmates started a business together. This IPP project gave me an opportunity to experience the happiness and passion of fight with the like-minded for the same goal. I believe our journey is leading us toward a prosperous future and our story is to be continued.

Part 3: Testimonial from Professor

Professor Ren Fei, Department of Management Science and Information System, Guanghua School of Management

I’m very glad to return to the Integration Program. What it didn’t change was its wide coverage of various areas of business management, like operation optimization, marketing innovation and strategy planning. This offered students diverse choices. The projects were all about practical problems faced by businesses. By participating in them, the students could gain hands-on experience from the business world. What made this year’s program special were the topics. They included the up-to-date topics of new retail, block chain and cryptocurrency, Internet of Things and going global initiative of Chinese enterprises. This showed the speed of Chinese enterprises’ growth and changes of their business philosophies. There were no fixed answers to these questions, which posed challenges to participating businesses and students. However, the result was great. It enriched the existing business management theories. We highly applaud it.

Due to the epidemic, the Integration program was initiated online and the survey was also made online. But it didn’t affect students’ passion and study progress. Even though there were no face-to-face meetings, students submitted their progress reports in a more professional and timely manner.

My impression about my team was that they were fast learners and doers. Each of them acted quickly to finish the assignments and delivered high-quality reports in a timely manner. The notes were well taken. The process showed that they were fast learners. Some students had certain experience in the industry, but most of them did not. The business world is changing fast, which is particularly true to ByteDance, the business our team worked on. Apart from keeping a busy class schedule, the students did a lot of research and established their logic system in a short period of time, which enabled them to have conversations with businesses in their language, go straight to the issue and come up with creative solutions.

What I want to say to the students is that I hope they should keep up with their good work and think creatively in the face of difficulties. They will get something from practice and gain satisfactory results.

About IPP

The Integrated Practicum Project (IPP) is a required course for full-time and international MBA classes at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. It is an education-industry partnership aimed at building a practice platform to help solve the practical problems at enterprises and improve the comprehensive management skills of MBA students. The basic framework of the IPP, an experiential course, is as follows: After completing the core courses, students go to the selected enterprises in teams to carry out business projects under the guidance of professors. They need to come up with proposals and hand over consulting reports to the enterprises and professors. Each project revolves around a real-world topic designed and provided by a particular enterprise based on its own needs in order to solve actual problems. In the IPP, the teams can provide strategic, marketing, human resources, financial, and other solutions to help address the management problems of enterprises in transition and devise business plans for the development of startups or growing enterprises.