Allen Shen, Business and marketing Education Major
Allen Shen took a nearly 7,000-mile detour in the middle of his University of Minnesota education.
During his second year in the business and marketing education program, Shen moved to Shanghai, China, the city where he had spent the first 10 years of his life.
“I wanted a change of pace and to see my relatives,” he explains. “But most importantly, I wanted to find a career that I would really be passionate about.”
Shen spent five years in China experimenting professionally. He acted in commercials and had a bit part in a movie called John Rabe. He coached soccer, taught English to business people, and led a marketing team for a small company that wanted to work with Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Then he tried his hand at entrepreneurship, approaching Chinese companies that wanted to do business in the United States.
“They don’t know how American corporations work, but I do,” he said. “The companies hired me to teach their employees how to make business connections in the States.”
Shen partnered with educational agents to find companies seeking the kind of training he wanted to offer and used his personal experience working with American firms to provide valuable “real world” examples to his students. He also had his students act out scenarios to reinforce the information. For example, Shen asked his students to use their negotiation skills to find ways for disparate companies—whose names they drew randomly from a hat—to work together.
Shen taught employees in four Chinese companies over the course of two years until he was certain that a career in marketing and training was the right path to follow. “In a way, I found myself, so I came back and decided it’s time to finish my degree,” he says.
Since then, he has enjoyed relating theories he learns in the classroom to his experiences in the working world. His favorite class to date, teaching marketing promotion, taught by Roy Gaddey in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, stands out because of the team projects. “I really enjoyed the project where we had to launch a new product in stores,” he says. “I learned a lot about who to contact, how to be a group leader, and so on.”
As to the future, Shen plans to complete his bachelor’s in May 2011 and then work for four or five years before pursuing a MBA. He hopes to someday work in the international corporate world doing marketing or training.
“Ideally I would like to work for an American company, like Ralph Lauren, in marketing and advertising in New York City and travel around the world,” he says. “I came from a bi-cultural background. I speak English as well as Mandarin. I will be taking a class in Rome, was in London during my sophomore year, and I have worked in China. So I feel that I have a certain advantage when it comes to getting international corporate work.”
Story by Brigitt Martin | Photo by Justin Evidon | May 2010
