Hi everyone I’m Lijin. As two thirds of my internship has past, I’ll share some of my working experience with my organization in this blog.

My organization held many conferences during my internship, so in the past 9 weeks, I spent half of my time in office and another half in hotels supporting different conferences and meetings.

Days in office

Working time is pretty flexible in my office, everyone arrives and leaves at different time. My workload varies in different weeks but it’s always manageable.

As I’m most productive in the morning, I always start working at 9am. My morning time is usually spent on creative work like drafting articles, doing literature reviews and dealing with conference related issues. I’ve been working on assignments related to mother tongue based multilingual education and just started to work on a project names Empowering ECCE Teachers to Implement SEL in Classroom.

Lunch break is my second favorite time of a day (yes, favorite time of a day is when I go home lol), I go to lunch with different colleagues. We have a big mall and quite a few small restaurants near our office, which are both delicious and affordable. It’s really relaxing to have some nice food and conversations after several hours of hard work.

Afternoon is for “boring” work that doesn’t require much mental labor as my I’m unable to concentrate as much as in the morning. Therefore, my afternoon time in office is consisted of proofreading, sending and replying emails, checking information of conference participants, updating and uploading things on our website and a series of random work that comes to me. I usually leave office around 6pm. People in office sometimes go for a drink afterwork but most of the time we go home directly to recover from the long working day. If not too exhausted, joining aerobic dance in my neighborhood is my new favorite thing.

Days at conferences

I’ve supported 4 conferences so far and they were: The Inclusion, Mobility and Multilingual Education Conference, The 5th Asia-Pacific Meeting on Education 2030, Happy School Seminar, and STEM for Women and Girls. 

While preparing for a conference involves a lot of tedious work, they helped me understand how a conference is held through the process. Attending a conference is always a rewarding experience as well. You can go to sessions you’re interested in and get to know the newest research and practice in the field. The best part of going to conferences is lunch, you can not only enjoy great food, but also have nice conversations with experts in the field. In addition, an unexpected skill I gained is photography. I was taught to use a camera and take photos professionally before the second conference. After practicing for 4 days during the conference, I feel like I’ve learned all the tips to take a good picture of people presenting and listening to the presentations.

The only thing I could complain about conferences is note-taking. As a non-native speaker, it’s very challenging for me catch up with everything in accents I’m not familiar with and summarize them in English immediately. Therefore, I have to record the presentations and go back to the recording to finish my notes, which means a lot of extra work. However, the process is less miserable if you see it as language practice and improvement. After all the conferences, I wasn’t surprised that my English listening and summarizing skills are greatly improved.

Nov. 23, 2019