Shenzhen Study Tour – A Report

Florian Schennach talks about his trip to China

 “My name is Florian Schennach and I am an industrial engineering and management student in the fifth semester. I had the great opportunity to choose an interdisciplinary elective, that took me for almost 10 days to Shenzhen to examine global innovation frontiers and discover new perspectives.

Now that I am back home in Austria, I want to write a short conclusion and reflection about my study trip to the City of Shenzhen in the beautiful south of China in the greater Bay area. I have spent almost 2 whole weeks there and gained a lot of interesting and mind-blowing experiences that I will never forget and will probably tell my grandchildren about in a couple decades.

We (Elias, Jan, Niklas, Christian and I) landed on Sunday in Shenzhen after a very long and exhausting travel day. It was my first time leaving our continent and I was already so excited as soon as we arrived at the Airport. We then took the incredibly punctual and clean metro to our Hotel in Futian. We all where flabbergasted when we got out of the station and saw all those skyscrapers around us. I have never seen so many tall buildings before and I was excited about that was about to come.

We then explored the city in the days we had before the study-tour officially began on Thursday. For example, we visited the Shenzhen tech market and strolled around Futian. We even hiked to the top of Wutong Mountain, where we had an amazing view of the whole city and the surrounding area. On our way up, we saw some wild boards which was a very cool experience as well.

Then on Thursday the study tour officially started, and we gained some insights to the very modern campus at the University of Shenzhen. In the afternoon we spent some time with the Chinese students and did some calligraphy work, which was very fun. On Friday we saw the very interesting and futuristic tech fare and visited Futian district, and we were invited to go up to the Ping-an Finance tower which was probably my favorite experience during my time in China.

On the weekend we went to the beach in Dameisha and visited the city center once more, where we enjoyed some great hot pot, where we tried frog meat (a first time for me). On the following days we were invited to BYD and Huawei, one of the biggest tech companies China has to offer, where we gained some interesting insights, which was especially interesting for me as an engineer.

On Wednesday, the last day of the study tour we went to the incredible city of Hong Kong, which was another highlight for me. We visited the center of trade of the WKO where we had a very interesting afternoon, after that we stayed in the City for some time and did some sightseeing, before taking the train back to Shenzhen.

On Thursday, our last day we visited the bay area and bay park, let the drones deliver us some fast food and we visited the flower park afterwards. On Friday we left China with great experiences, a lot of new knowledge and memories we will never forget.”