Alumni Profile: Juliet Zhu

Mundus Cohort 2006-2008 / London

Juliet Zhu is Managing Director Asia Pacific & Global Director of Emerging Markets, ABI, a specialized B2B Marketing and public relations firm. Her role involves looking after the operations and the businesses of ABI’s two Asian offices in Singapore and in Shanghai. She travels frequently to meet with the company’s affiliates in different countries where there’s not an ABI office and says her job requires her to have an understanding and working knowledge of all aspects of the business; profit & loss, HR, admin, client servicing, getting new clients on board and maintaining good media relations. 

She’s been with ABI since graduating from the Mundus Journalism programme’s Business and Financial journalism specialty in London. In fact, it was during her specialism year that Juliet’s career direction really took form. She decided it would be a good idea to brush up on her writing skills and to “get a taste of working in the UK”. To that effect she chanced upon ABI which was just a five minute walk from the University in Clerkenwell, and started a part-time internship with the company. The rest, as they say, is history. She was offered a full-time position upon graduating and two years later, found herself alone in Singapore and with nothing but an empty office to start rebuilding the company’s Asia-Pacific presence.

“At the beginning when I joined, it was learning about different industries and writing about them. Then it was brushing up skills on media relations and before I knew it, I was parachuted to a new country that I had never been to.”

Juliet says the most enjoyable part of her job is that there’s always something new to learn - which is also the most challenging aspect, especially when she was moved to Singapore. “The first 6 months were tough. I thought I could speak both English and Chinese to everyone but I didn't understand either language for quite some time because of the accent. Fortunately after that period, I could communicate in Singlish with the locals, made some friends, moved the office to a nice neighborhood, and I also moved to a part of the city where I really enjoy and have lived until now.”

She says that although she was one of the few Mundus students from her year to go into public relations, it was a natural progression for her. “I just followed the way. I have always heard people complaining they didn't like their job, but I love what I do from that first day of the internship and I still love it.” Having a MA which covers not just media and globalisation, but business and finance journalism, and political science, has also been helpful too.

"I have been considering taking an MBA class but every time I looked at the promoted class schedule, I thought; 'wait I have done it with Erasmus Mundus already'."

“The courses in Denmark built the foundation and the framework of how I see the world, and the political economy class in City University London further built on that. By the time I graduated, I wouldn't go to the extreme to say that I was totally changed but these were great foundations that I had. I have always been passionate and believed in emerging markets, and these framework that I learned then continued to benefit me until now.”

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