This was an incredible experience that I will never forget. Working at Mundolingua allowed me to meet so many wonderful people, learn new creative skills, improve on my public speaking in French, and understand what type of work environment I would love to seek out again in the future. Two months of leading student groups, contacting and connecting with schools around France, and improving displays, artifacts, and merchandise for the museum have passed by in a flash.
Speaking was definitely the biggest skill I worked on this summer. From tourists to locals to my bilingual colleagues, I felt like I was able to improve my French language skills and my general public speaking skills so much during this experience. I got comfortable explaining the ins and outs of the museum in both languages as well as guiding students on how to find information for their worksheets. And despite not always understanding what someone had said or how to express my thoughts, I got more confident in asking for clarification or trying my best to communicate anyways.
Moreover, I have always known I enjoy working on multiple projects at a time, but this is the first environment where I truly got to jump around between different types of projects. It was really refreshing to be able to work on adding to an excel spreadsheet, or improving the PowerPoint displays, or researching language and linguistic policy, or even crafting something for the museum when I had less capacity to welcome visitors or monitor students.
From this experience, I’ve realized that I would love to work in similar environments in the future. Whether it is a more business related job or a more linguistics related one, I would love to have the flexibility to handle projects of different types that suit my interests and skills. It has made me consider potentially finding a way to volunteer more this coming school year if I can, as it is something I have thought about but not had the time to fully consider before. If not, I am sure I can use my skills to be a strong board member for my clubs this year. I am now a board member for the Rainbow Alliance, taking on a completely new role intended to strengthen the LGBTQ+ community at Pitt by connecting with other Queer clubs and helping inform students of various important resources and organizations.
I can absolutely see myself using my improved networking skills to help organize collaborative events with other clubs at Pitt and my technological skills to organize easily accessible lists of information on different resources. While I am still working with my board members to fully develop my role and determine what projects are needed to improve the club, my focus is to try and help my community around me by connecting them with services, programs, and supportive and friendly people. This goes for all the communities I am a part of in the Pittsburgh area, from friends to official organizations–it would be a pleasure to help aid as many people as I can with my role in the Rainbow Alliance, not only LGBTQ+ Pitt students. In addition to organizing collaborations and resource information, I would also like to design materials for my club and reorganize our office room display case so that more students can view resource information and club event times both in person and online.
My research skills I worked on this summer will come in handy too for finding new resources to add to our lists and finding guides on how to best display the data. I would love to create something easily accessible in the sense that it is not blocked behind a login, easy to read and navigate, and always up to date. Thus, my first task as the school year approaches is to start collecting my links and information and decide how I may present this information. From there, I will need to look at how to share my creation so more people can keep it for reference.
Returning to my internship, it truly helped me work on both hard and soft skills in a way that inspired me to find ways to apply them in professional and personal contexts. I touched on how I would like to improve my work for my board member position just now, but my time at my museum has also highlighted how I need to work harder on my time management and project organization. As such, I have begun to rethink how I approach this upcoming school year and am planning to cut back in some areas to better balance the time I spend on studying, caring for myself, and helping my community.
In other words, not only did this experience allow me to improve in a variety of areas, it also made me reflect harder on what my weak points are and how to correct them. It showed me how I can be helpful and how my weaknesses affect my current progress, allowing me to slow down and reflect on how my traits might show up in my future experiences in life and work. I am ever grateful for this opportunity and will be taking more time to consider both my newfound strengths and reoccurring weaknesses to tackle this schoolyear in a more organized and fun way.
