Last Thursday, April 11, we hosted the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (HNC) students on their Beijing Career Trek at our hutong courtyard.

Led by Robbie Shields, Student Career Counselor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, the purpose of the trek to Beijing was to give current HNC students an introduction to the HNC alumni community in Beijing and explore the exciting career opportunities available through those alumni.

There was a huge turnout, almost double our expectations and our courtyard was brimming with a mix of current HNC students, Hopkins alumni and prospective students.

A panel of alumni club leaders, moderated by Dr. Jason Patent, American Co-director at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies, discussed important alumni developments and answered questions about utilizing the Hopkins community post-graduation. Alumni club leaders also talked about their experience finding jobs in Beijing and how staying engaged with the Hopkins alumni community was helpful in their search.

Finally, our Chief Pengyou, Holly Chang, spoke about the exciting partnership between Project Pengyou and HNC that will officially launch at the end of June across the HNC and SAIS alumni communities. Supported by a one-year grant from The Ford Foundation, we are working together to accomplish HNC’s goal of strengthening engagement with their alumni community, which in turn will generate best practices and new online features to be rolled out to the entire Project Pengyou network.

HNC is the oldest U.S.-China study center with a prominent network of alumni that seeks to promote constructive relations between the U.S. and China. We are very excited to be collaborating with HNC to strengthen their alumni communities and build out the alumni network of President Obama’s 100,000 Strong Initiative to improve the future of peaceful U.S.-China relations.

A big thanks to HNC and the Hopkins Alumni Club of Beijing for collaborating on a great event! We look forward to future events with HNC in Shanghai, Nanjing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.