In 2008, Rob Liou was working as an auditor at a large accounting firm in San Francisco, but found that he didn’t have a passion for the field. Nor was he interested in the dominant industries in the Bay Area, such as tech, biotech and retail. Liou began to research graduate schools to pursue an MBA. While visiting Ross, he learned about WDI and its summer internships and even met several past interns. “Being involved with the Institute was something I wrote about wanting to do in my application to U-M,” Liou said. After his first year of MBA studies, Liou approached WDI with an idea for a project. Most of the Institute’s summer internship projects are developed by staff with a group of established external partners. But WDI also allows graduate students to build their own internship projects based on their interests, as long as they fall within one of the Institute’s research focus areas. For these self-initiated internships, students are tasked with contacting an organization and working with senior managers there to define the scope of work. A proposal is then presented to WDI for potential funding. Liou had an idea that he might like to work in China after graduation. To test that idea, he conceived of a project to help organic tea farmers in the southwestern province of Guizhou develop a marketing strategy to export their tea to more lucrative foreign markets, such as the U.S. Some of the farmers were part of a company, while others worked independently and sold their tea directly to a buyer. One of Liou’s goals was to get the farmers and companies to form co- operatives. To accomplish this task, Liou worked with two graduate students and a professor from Guizhou University. The foursome traveled through the province extensively to visit farmers and sites where the tea was grown. While there, Liou met a husband and wife who agreed to provide funding to help with the market expansion idea. “They weren’t really doing this for money; they just wanted to make life better for the local farmers,” he said. “We wanted to help them because he and his wife were such caring and passionate people. Many of the people I met in China tended to typify those traits – very sincere, hard-working and not driven by money. “They’re what made me want to come back after graduation, and that’s what has kept me here for the past six years.” Liou’s hard work paid off. Two years after his internship, he was contacted by a U.S.-based tea importer who had seen an article about Liou’s internship on the WDI website and was interested in buying tea from the farmers. Liou put him in touch with the people running the co-operative in Guizhou. Rob Liou Rob Liou, center, in China with fellow performers in a singing festival Alumni Features 60 William Davidson Institute