On the Self-Growth from Canton Fair Internship

Stannis Song ( Song Wenbo )
20130301199
SEIB 1304

ABSTRACT:
This study examined the self-growth and personal development of the Canton Fair internship for students from SEIB school. And this study will give certain promising suggestions to students who are going for this internship and also suggestions to the Canton Fair Internship Project developers. Data were collected from 257 students in SEIB school by questionnaire via Wenjuanxing. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

KEY WORDS:
Opportunity cost, self-growth, personal development.

1. Introduction
Canton Fair, which is also known as China Import and Export Fair or Chinese Export Commodity Fair, is now the greatest trade fair in China, considering its attendance number, exhibition area and its business volume. Canton Fair was first held in 1957, and organized by China Foreign Trade Centre in Gunagzhou, Guangdong. It was first initiated to search for new substitutes of foreign trade when China was sanctioned by many capitalist countries and most of China’s trade allies and diplomatic relations were socialist nations. During the past 59 years, 59 times of Canton Fairs were held and were widely regarded as a milestone to China’s development of its external economic relations. They represented not only the impressive achievement of trade volume, but also emerged the development from a planned to a market-oriented economy.
As a student from GDUFS SEIB school, each of us are required to join the internship in Canton Fair, and are distributed into very different work positions. What would those junior students learn from their maybe first internship? What further impact does this Canton Fair internship have on them?
This paper begins with a literature review on personality measurement and on self-growth and personal development, then proposes several research questions to measure a respondent’s personal development, finally discusses about what students would learn and self-growth from their internship in Canton Fair, and what further impact this internship has on them.

2. Literature review
Such a giant exhibition like China Import and Export Fair is absolutely a good chance to challenge oneself as an internship no matter in what kind of work position; there are also a lot of students who have ever been interning there say that they have experienced what workplace be like in advance, and have accumulated some experience while working as an interpreter or a manager. Some of those well-performed interns were even screened by some exhibitors to be a regular employee, and were promised to keep their offers till they finished their school. It turns out that a Canton Fair internship seem to be a win-win game.
But there are still problems.
To measure and to sense one’s own personal development or self-growth after a certain case, there are several existing methods. But first it’s important to define a person’s career personality, then by comparing their self-assessment and initial career personality, one’s self-growth can be then figured out. Knowledge and understanding of the personality type as assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Theory instrument can be a tool for personal growth, achieving balance, understanding self, and creating possibilities (Applications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Counseling by Judith A. Provost, CAPT 1993). Your personality type doesn't change over time, and of course it doesn’t change after your Canton Fair internship, and it’s almost the most popular method to test one’s career personality. Type development is a lifelong process and understanding type can help you overcome challenges at various stages of life including youth, midlife, retirement, and aging.
Psychosocial theories look at self-growth and personal development as a series of tasks or stages in which there are changes in thinking, feeling, behaving, valuing, and relating to others and to oneself (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991). The psychosocial theories include Erikson’s (1959) eight developmental crises, Marcia’s (1980) model of ego identity status, Josselson’s (1987) pathways to identity development in women, and Chickering and Reisser’s (1993) seven vectors of development. Erikson’s Stage 5 (identity versus identity diffusion) occurs in late adolescence and early adulthood and is a transitions that “… signals a call to define the self” (Evans, et al, 1998). Marcia’s ego identity model builds on 15 Erikson’s theory and proposes that there are two psychosocial tasks in identity development: choosing among meaningful but competing alternatives and making occupational and ideological commitments (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991). Young adults embark on an exploration of values and goals that often calls into question those defined by their parents. In forming individual identity, commitments are made in political, religious, occupational, and sexual decision making (Evans, et al, 1998).
To compare one’s self-assessment and initial career personality, measuring opportunity cost is a good way. “…under opportunity-cost time pressure, subjects received a lower expected payoff when the goal was to emphasize choice accuracy than when the goal was to emphasize savings in effort.” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 66, Issue 2, May 1996, Pages 131–152)
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives. An opportunity cost is the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.
In this Canton Fair internship case, just like what’s been mentioned above, the opportunity cost of joining the compulsive internship is to give up one’s school classes or one’s own internship.
No options also lead to fatigue, which mean at first they may be energetic about their internship because of the class suspension, but when realizing that there are no options to choose, students may easily get fatigue about their internship job, according to the ‘Marginal utility’ theory. ‘Marginal utility’ theory, in economics, the marginal utility of a good or service is the gain from an increase, or loss from a decrease, in the consumption of that good or service. Economists sometimes speak of a law of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more utility than the second and subsequent units, with a continuing reduction for greater amounts. The marginal decision rule states that a good or service should be consumed at a quantity at which the marginal utility is equal to the marginal cost. In sociology, it’s also called ‘Deprivation-Satisfaction Proposition’ theory.

3. Theoretical background and research questions
To measure one’s self-growth, John W. Payne’s opportunity-cost pressure theory has been applied to the questionnaire and this paper. “…under opportunity-cost time pressure, subjects received a lower expected payoff when the goal was to emphasize choice accuracy than when the goal was to emphasize savings in effort.” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 66, Issue 2, May 1996, John W. Payne, Pages 131–152)
According to the Opportunity-Cost pressure theory, whenever a person makes a choice, he or she has to put the benefit offered by the other choice away, and it satisfies the person better when the goal is to emphasize choice accuracy than when the goal was to emphasize savings in effort. In this Canton Fair internship case the opportunity cost of joining the compulsive internship is to give up one’s school classes or one’s own internship.
So, to what extent do these students cherish this internship experience? What students think they would get and lose from this brief Canton Fair internship? Hypothesis is made bellow according to the Opportunity Cost theory.
“The largest part of the students think positive about their self-growth during the Canton Fair internship, the second think modest about it, and the least part of them think negative of it.”

4. Method
The questionnaire was designed based on the Opportunity Cost Model*( The opportunity cost model: Automaticity, individual differences, and self-control resources Martin S. Hagger Curtin University), which targets at analyzing to what extent an individual gains from a certain behavior by comparing the opportunity cost and concerning individual difference.
The questionnaire contains questions like “At the time when you are required to attend the Canton Fair internship, are you in your own internship?” to estimate what a respondent have to give up. Questions like “In the Canton Fair internship, have you been doing a certain job which needed pre-training or special skills? If yes, do you find it useful for your later job hunting?” and “In the Canton Fair internship, have you been inspired by some details from it which you found useful for your later job hunting?” were directly looking into whether the respondent value this compulsory internship or feel pity about the opportunity cost in emotion.
The questionnaire was randomly delivered to 1000 people on April 2nd, finally 257 respondents participated in this study till May 13th who were all randomly selected.

5. Results
From the 257 effective questionnaires we acquired, all results are listed below:

Table 1 (Question 1) At the time when you are required to attend the Canton Fair internship, are you in your own internship? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes | 66 | 25% | B. No | 191 | 75% |

Table 2 (Question 2) If you have already got your own internship, what did you do to deal with it? Did your supervisor keep the intern position for you when you were back from the Canton Fair? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. I had no internship at that time. | 191 | 75% | B. I resigned my internship, and no position was kept for me. | 18 | 7% | C. I asked for leave from my own internship and succeed in getting my intern position kept when I was back. | 30 | 11% | D. I asked for leave from my own internship and failed to get my intern position kept when I was back. | 8 | 3% | E. Other | 10 | 4% |
From the first and the second table, 25% of the respondents suffered the opportunity cost of giving up a current internship temporarily or permanently.

Table 3 (Question 3) In the Canton Fair internship, have you been doing a certain job which needed pre-training or special skills? If yes, do you find it useful for your later job hunting? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes, and I found it useful. | 75 | 29% | B. Yes, but I found it useless. | 56 | 21% | C. No, I haven’t been doing such a job. | 126 | 50% |
From this table, 50% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 29% thinks positive of it.

Table 4 (Question 4) In the Canton Fair internship, have you been inspired by some details from it which you found useful for your later job hunting? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes | 188 | 73% | B. NO | 69 | 27% |
From this table, 27% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 73% thinks positive of it.

Table 5 (Question 5) Were you satisfied with the working experience that the Canton Fair offered? To what extent? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes, I was quite satisfied that time. | 93 | 36% | B. Yes, I was satisfied, but it still had a long way from my expectation. | 82 | 32% | C. No, I was dissatisfied. | 82 | 32% |
From this table, 32% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 36% thinks positive of it.

Table 6 (Question 6) Can your satisfaction or gains offset your dissatisfaction or losses? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes, absolutely it can. | 52 | 20% | B. Eh, almost, I guess. | 78 | 30% | C. No, not at all. | 127 | 50% |
From this table, 50% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 20% thinks positive of it.

Table 7 (Question 7) To what extent this intenship matches your initial imagination or expection? Is is eaiser or harder than what you have expected? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. It is far eaiser than my expection, and I am satisfied about this. | 48 | 18% | B. It is far eaiser than my expection, but I am disatisfied about this. | 120 | 47% | C. It is far harder than my expection, but I am satisfied about this. | 18 | 7% | D. It is far harder than my expection, and I am disatisfied about this. | 39 | 15% | E. It is just like what I’ve expected. | 32 | 12% |
From this table, 62% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 26% thinks positive of it.

Table 8 (Question 8) If you are the director of this Canton Fair Internship Project, will you continue to work on this project and make your students go for it? | Options | Total | Ratio | A. Yes, absolutely I will. | 62 | 24% | B. Yes, but no more a compulsory one. | 157 | 61% | C. No, I won’t. | 38 | 15% |
From this table, 15% of the respondents think negative of this internship, 24% thinks positive of it.

From those 8 tables above, it can be figured out that about 39.3% of those persons feel crashed by this Canton Fair internship and think negative of their self-growth or personal development during this internship, while 34.7% of them think positive of it, the rest 26% thinks mild of this internship (by averaging the N-rate and P-rate form Question 3 to Question 8). And about 25% of the respondents particularly suffered the opportunity cost of giving up their current internship – of who 39% lost their initial internship job permanently (Calculated from the rate of Question 1 and Question 2).

6. Discussion
According to the statistics above, it is obvious that among those who think negative, positive or mild of the Canton Fait internship, 39.3%, which is also the largest part of those three sorts, consider the opportunity-cost is too huge to compensate, and assume that their self-growth and personal development from this Canton Fair internship is also negative compared with their opportunity cost.
Under opportunity-cost time pressure, subjects received a lower expected payoff when the goal was to emphasize choice accuracy than when the goal was to emphasize savings in effort (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 66, Issue 2, May 1996, John W. Payne, Pages 131–152), and in the Canton Fair internship case, students get disappointed easily because some of them (25%) suffered certain irreparable opportunity cost, and most of them (39.3%) consider the gains can’t compensate their opportunity cost. 15% of them even want to cancel this internship project if they were the project director.
For most of the students, the largest opportunity cost they suffered is – with such a 3-week-long time, how many lessons and schoolwork they have to trade? For those who are preparing for the postgraduate exam, the time cost is irreparable. And for those who take the Canton Fair internship seriously, they feel crushed because this internship didn’t offer them enough hand-on experience or work skills, which leads to 39.3% disappointment.

7. Conclusion
This paper raised a hypothesis that “the largest part of the students think positive about their self-growth during the Canton Fair internship, the second think modest about it, and the least part of them think negative of it”, and according to the data above, it turns out that the biggest part (39.3%) of the students think negative of it, while the second (34.7%) think positive of it, the least part (25%) is the modest one.
This Canton Fair internship, even though it includes actual operation of convention and exhibition of the employer, but overall most of the students were doing jobs which require few skills, and most of them even don’t need to speak or read English, although they are all form English major. According to the Opportunity Cost theory( The opportunity cost model: Automaticity, individual differences, and self-control resources Martin S. Hagger Curtin University), to measure the personal development of oneself in Canton Fair internship, those who considered themselves negative in terms of self-growth must suffer more opportunity cost such as losing their former internship, losing their time for preparing for the exam, losing a precious chance to experience an expected job than those who think positive or modest of it.

References

Emil Kauder, 1965, “Marginal utility theory”, History of Marginal Utility Theory

Evans, et al, 1998, “… signals a call to define the self”

Evans, et al, 1998, “Young adults embark on an exploration of values and goal…”

John Ceaser, 1996, “To compare one’s self-assessment and initial career personality”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 66 Pages 131–152

Judith A. Provost, CAPT 1993, “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Theory”, Applications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Counseling

Martin S. Hagger, Curtin University, 1999, “Opportunity Cost Model”, The opportunity cost model: Automaticity, individual differences, and self-control resources

Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, “Self-growth and personal development as a series of tasks or stages … ”

Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, “Choosing among meaningful…”