I still remember my very first day of internship and now it’s approaching to an end. In this blog, I would like to share some of my reflections on the past 4 months.

During my internship, I’m mainly responsible for two projects. One is about Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MLE) and the other one is related to Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). 

MLE 

For the MLE project, our organization held an international conference on language education. It was the first time I involved in preparing a conference. My team members provided me endless support so I caught up with everything quickly even though I started my internship only 3 weeks before the conference. My biggest take-away would be the knowledge of how a conference is held, my colleagues continually explained how everything works patiently through the process. 

Another gain from MLE related work is the theme itself. Growing up in a monolingual environment, I never knew that language could be an obstacle in life until becoming an international student and starting to study and live in an English environment myself. I struggled a lot in my first semester but I only considered it as my personal issue. However, after working on MLE in my organization, I realized that language is actually an important issue that hinders numerous people from learning and even communicating with others. I’ve been interested in Early Childhood Education for a long time and have found it’s a large and general topic. After all the exposing to MLE, I’m inspired to focus more on language issues in ECE in the future.

ECCE

By drafting literature review and article, I gained more knowledge on the current status, challenges and opportunities of ECCE in Asia-Pacific region. Before my internship, I only concentrate on ECCE issues in my own country. Nevertheless, I gained more knowledge on ECCE challenges and opportunities faced by the wider range of the world during working in my organization, which provided me more perspectives on international educational development. 

In all, my internship is great experience to me. As someone who has never worked before, I got a taste of what’s it like to work in the field, learned from all kinds of work and there’s so much to appreciate in the journey. I really enjoyed working with people from different backgrounds but have same interests in education. Moreover, some people I met in the organization are very passionate about the work they are doing, which further inspired me to think about pursing a career in the field of educational development. 

Dec. 21, 2019