Hello everyone,
It’s been a while since my last post, and I want to apologize for the gaps in this journey. Between my internship this year and organizing prom with the committee, things got pretty demanding.
In summer 2025, I did an internship as an AI Engineer at OM AI in Hangzhou, China. I’m Chinese and grew up in Austria. Before Covid, I visited China every year, but this was my first time back in years, and my first time not as a visitor but working there. My Mandarin is honestly not that great, so it felt both familiar and completely new at the same time.
Arriving
Landing in Hangzhou after so many years was a strange feeling. A lot had changed since my last visit, and things I remembered from my childhood trips looked different now. At work, people expected me to understand everything because I look like I belong, and then I’d freeze when someone spoke too fast or used technical words I’d never learned at home. At first that was embarrassing, but it quickly became my biggest motivation to improve.
The Work
At OM AI I worked on drones. I improved their object detection and obstacle avoidance and implemented simple strategy logic so they could make basic decisions on their own. I also helped integrate our systems with HTTP servers and REST APIs, and ran tests with NanoVLM and in simulations.
It was my first real contact with ROS2 and embodied AI, which means AI that doesn’t just live on a screen but actually moves and acts in the physical world. Seeing code I wrote make a drone avoid an obstacle was one of the coolest moments of the whole summer. Toward the end, I also helped prepare demos for WAIC, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which showed me how fast ideas turn into products there.
The People
My colleagues were all great: young, motivated and always happy to help me. My Mandarin was good enough for small talk but not always for technical discussions, so I mixed Chinese and English. They were patient with me, and by the end I could follow meetings much better than at the start. One of my best memories is the day a new humanoid robot arrived at the company. Everyone gathered around it, and seeing it in person made embodied AI feel very real.
What Opened My Eyes
This internship showed me how seriously AI is being built and deployed, not just in software but in real machines. I learned how much you can grow when you’re thrown into the deep end, and that curiosity and the willingness to ask questions matter more than knowing everything already. And I got to see China through the eyes of an adult and a coworker, not just a kid on summer holiday.
Looking Back
This internship changed how I think about my future, my studies, and what I want to build. In my next post, I’ll probably tell you about my internship this year, which was also in China.
Thanks for sticking with me despite the long break. From now on, I’ll try to write a new post every month, so stay tuned.
Sascha Zhang
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