On the evening of December6th, the third peer salon, one of the signature academic eventsunveiled by the School of Global Governance of Renmin University of China, was successfully held in Mingde Business Building. The guest speaker of this salon was Zeng Chen, a student of the School of Global Governance and the School of International Relations. He is also a graduate of the Double Master's Program at King's College London.

Zeng's research interests were inequality and political trust in Europe. He has worked as an intern and consultant at UNDP. At the beginning of 2024, he will work as a research assistant at an EU research institute.

Zeng Chen’s sharing was mainly about how to strike a balance between internship work and his academic interests. He also shared with students of Renmin University of China on how to find their own positioning in the job search of international organizations under the current political situation with turmoil in the world.

In the formal sharing,Zeng Chen told about his study and life experience since graduate school with the combination of both his study in King's College, and the process of applying for a job and a PhD. He introduced that he used to do monitoring and evaluation in UNDP, where he found that there were similarities between project evaluation and audit, involving external experts and organizations to evaluate the different stages of the project.

He also shared that the data analysis part of the social sciences was more useful for monitoring, and the data visualization and programming capabilities of scientific research can be transferred to the actual work of international organizations. As he said, in general, computers and languages are the most common skills needed for working in international organizations.

Apart from his firsthand experience, Zeng shared with the students sincerely his success and failure of various applications over the past year, encouraging everyone to see that behind any experience there is a lot of efforts, frustration, opportunities and also failures.

Zeng Chen also compared the experience of job interviews in different places. He cited China and Europe as examples, mentioning the selection mechanism and focus of academic and industry work in different countries. For example, he mentioned that applying for a resume in China is more of an audition process, with multiple rounds of interviews to choose the best. In Europe, however, there is a greater focus on reviewing resumes and motivation letters at the shortlisting stage, and relatively few people enter the interview process.

Zeng thanked Renmin University of China for its rich resources for students to have international exchanges, and he encouraged more students who had the passion for working in international organizations to seize the opportunities and apply for it. But he also reminded the students to make sound plans for themselves based on their different interest, mobility and ambitions.

In the end, he shared with the students that no matter what they would do in the future, they should always try their best to show their talent and their capability for the specific position, fully demonstrating that they are the best one for their ideal position.

Following his sharing is the Q&A session in which Zeng Chen engaged in an in-depth dialogue with the guests, answering questions from students concerning application, language learning, career development and many other aspects.