By Gargi Dargan
Editor's note: Adapted from Gargi's August 2018 internship report. This is a personal reflection on that programme, not a description of current internship arrangements, software capabilities or video-platform instructions.
The Modlingua summer internship brought online meetings and practical assignments into my language learning. Over roughly two months in 2018, the tasks moved from checking a professional profile to working with speech, subtitles, marketing and scripts. Ravi Kumar guided us through the programme.
Starting with a careful profile check
Our first assignment asked us to proofread the profile we had prepared for Modlingua. We went through the description, considered the corrections it needed and identified different kinds of errors, including grammar and punctuation.
The review also covered the profile photograph: whether it was suitable and whether its dimensions needed adjustment. The task made us look at the presentation of the profile as well as its written content.
Learning about writing tools
The next assignment introduced tools that could support our later work. Grammarly was one of them, and we were asked to write about it.
In my original report, I described the tool as a kind of mentor and treated a corrected text as free of mistakes. That was my impression at the time. It should not be read as a guarantee that software finds every error or replaces a person's judgment.
Moving from speech to subtitles
After online classes about transcription, we listened to audio and wrote down the speech. The assignment connected careful listening with producing written text from a video.
Subtitling followed as the fourth assignment. We learned how subtitles could be added to our video. These were practical tasks in the 2018 programme, rather than a guide to the way a video platform works now.
Looking beyond the language classroom
Later work introduced marketing, including online and visual marketing. I found this a useful learning experience because it brought another side of professional work into the programme.
The sixth and seventh assignments turned to script writing and writing about a well-known person who inspired us. Together, the tasks exposed us to forms of communication beyond the academic work we were used to.
What the programme meant to me
I saw the internship as a chance to connect academic learning with practical work. Completing the assignments required effort, but the online meetings and the range of topics gave us material to work with.
My final report was positive about the experience. I felt a sense of development from trying the tasks and from seeing how language learning could connect with work outside the classroom. That is the reflection I recorded in 2018, rather than a claim about my current skills or career.
