During the previous semester break from 24 January to 18 February 2026, some of our first-year and second-year students had the opportunity to participate in internships at various companies. Congratulations to everyone for completing their internship successfully and our utmost gratitude to the management and staff at each company for accepting our students!

During this period, a first-year student, Tan Eng Feng, undertook an internship at Bridge International Asia Sdn Bhd.

Below is a comment about his internship experience:

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I was given the opportunity to experience my first ever internship in my life at Bridge International Asia Sdn. Bhd. From what I understood, the company functions as a “bridge” to connect Japanese companies to the Malaysia and Southeast Asia market.

I was assigned to write an article about the Malaysian market and economy. Since the goal is to write an article in Japanese, I was taught to extract data from DOSM (Department of Statistics Malaysia) while utilising AI tools wisely to support my task. For example, using Google Trends for identifying query popularity (as a future predictor) and Google Analytics for analyzing the reaction of posted articles (as a rearview mirror).

There were even some useful tools and concepts taught, like how the concept of Agentic AI can help to develop your website entirely and automatically (it’s crazily efficient!). Because of this, I asked a classmate, and he recommended Replit to me, which is connected to the use of Python (considering I am learning Python).

In the process of constructing the theme of the article to post, I thought as a Malaysian citizen and student, knowing isn’t enough, so I made up my mind to focus on understanding Malaysia’s economy based on data and statistics through DOSM reports. Within this 1 month, I can relate and understand macro-economics deeper through debating with Gemini. The written articles were related to Malaysia Economic Indicators (MEI), Median wages & GDP. Of course, using Python to visualize multiple variables of data deepened my view on macroeconomics.

Since the initial text was mainly generated by Gemini, my focus was on strict verification rather than just worrying about my Japanese. I repeatedly listened to the output to ensure an equal tone, filtered out obscure phrasing, optimized readability, and most importantly, checked for logical bias or fearmongering. The data visualization simply confirmed the logic I already had in mind. Finally, getting assistance from seniors and classmates helped finalize the output and alleviated my remaining anxiety.

Overall, this was a valuable experience. Working completely at my own pace allowed me to dedicate 12-hour days to this process, turning what started as "fun knowledge" into a solid, practical understanding of macroeconomics.

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We hope that experiences like this will inspire other UTMy students to actively seek opportunities to explore different industries and develop their professional skills.

As a Japanese university, UTMy encourages students to undertake shorter internships during semester breaks. This approach allows students to gain experience with different companies and industries, helping them better understand their interests and future career paths.