INTERNSHIP REPORT
Country of stay: Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Duration of stay: June 30 - August 25, 2007
Type of work: Intern at the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Last winter I got an e-mail about an internship position in Indianapolis, USA. The intern would be working as a research assistant for a linguistic research center, Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC). I decided that I would apply for the position since l have been interested in linguistics since the beginning of my studies and also my bachelor’s thesis is a linguistic paper about computer-mediated communication. I thought I might get some good ideas for later research papers and maybe for my master’s thesis – and I was right.
I wrote an application, sent my CV and other documents to Indiana, and fairly soon after I was told that I got the internship position and that another student, Eva Norrman, would also come to Indianapolis but she would be working at the Dean’s office. I was very pleased that I got the position in ICIC since I thought I would gain more of working there than in the Dean’s office. I am aiming to become a teacher and I knew the center arranged English as a Second Language (ESL)- courses that the interns might get to participate in or even teach a lesson. I am very interested in adult education and I think it is very useful for English teachers in Finland to get to know some of the ESL teaching methods.
I was surprised at how much paperwork was involved in getting an unpaid internship. I had to fill in many different forms, answer questions like “Were you a part of the Nazi-government?”, give names and addresses of people who would “vouch” for me and so on. I even had to go to Helsinki for a visa interview that only took 3 minutes but I had to wait in line for one and a half hours. Also the costs were surprising; the visa alone cost 80 euros + 100 dollars and on top of that I had to get special-size pass photos and obviously pay the train tickets to Helsinki and back and a taxi to the embassy. It was a good thing I had been working and saving money – otherwise I could never afford a stay like that. The Donner grant helped a lot but did not nearly cover all the costs.
When my internship of two months at ICIC was coming to an end I could not believe it would be over soon. Looking back it seemed to me like it was last week I left for Indianapolis – two months went by fast. I took with me memories and experience that I will no doubt value the rest of my life; the internship taught me a lot about working in an academic setting, about American culture, and obviously I learned a great deal of both spoken and written English.
My work in ICIC consisted of smaller and bigger tasks varying from regular office work to helping in writing and editing research papers. I especially enjoyed conducting literature reviews and doing editing work for upcoming articles and books (e.g. Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric, Connor, Nagelhout, & Rozycki, in press; Discourse on the move, Connor, Upton, & Biber, in press; From contrastive to intercultural rhetoric, Connor, manuscript in preparation). I also ran frequency and wordlist analyses with WordSmith program, created and revised tables etc. It was very interesting for me to see how linguistic research papers are written, and how important it is to go back to the text over and over again. Watching and being part of this process made me even more convinced that linguistic research is what I want to do in the future. I also got to observe Drs. Connor and Rozycki and how they did their research and how they worked on their publications – and also how they taught.
I helped in the arranging of the ESP Institute, and participated in some of Dr. Rozycki’s G541: “Materials Preparation for ESL Instruction” classes. I really think it was useful for me to participate in these classes, since teaching English is an important part of my future plans, and I got a lot of new ideas for using, developing, and creating materials from the G541 classes. I saved all the articles we read on the course and I am sure I will have use of them later here in Finland. I would be very interested in looking at materials development for English teaching more closely – it might even be a good idea for a research paper.
I also assisted in preparing for the Tsuda-ICIC Intensive Summer English program, which is arranged every summer in ICIC. The students are 15-20 young women from Tsuda-collage in Tokyo, Japan. I also assisted the main instructor Honnor Orlando in an oral skills class. It was very interesting since I had never before been in an English class where the teacher and students do not share a language. I have been teaching English for people aged from 9 to 45 as a substitute teacher since the beginning of my studies, but it was different because I was able to use Finnish or Swedish to explain different grammar points and vocabulary. In an ESL class one cannot do that, which brings many challenges. The Japanese students were very eager to learn and good learners but sometimes it was hard to tell whether they understood what was being said. However, there are certainly advantages in an ESL classroom situation; the students are “forced” to use English all the time which improves their pronunciation and other language skills, and they also get used to hearing English. It would be interesting to try an ESL-based approach in English classes here in Finland as well. After I came back I have tried to make my English teaching more authentic and use Finnish or Swedish as little as possible.
Moreover, I joined the Tsuda-group on their trip to Chicago, which was a lot of fun. We did a lot of sightseeing, had guided tours and also just walked around the city – we even happened to walk right into the set of filming the newest Batman-film! It was nice to learn to know the girls a bit better and we made good friends with the instructor, Honnor. I tried to help her in any way I could so I was also working during the trip.
During my internship we discussed with Dr. Ulla Connor and Dean Marianne Wokeck on August 14 about an official student exchange program between IUPUI and Åbo Akademi University. Eva Norrman and I had a lunch meeting with Dean Wokeck, who is very interested in the exchange. Eva and I also gave a short presentation about our university at the graduate student orientation in the English Department on August 21. It might be a good idea though to talk to the students doing their Bachelor’s degree as well; many of the graduate students were older than most of the 4th or 5th -year students here in Åbo Akademi, many were married and had family, which would probably make it more difficult for them to come to Finland (and stay in student housing and so on). However, I am very optimistic about the exchange and really hope that students from IUPUI will be interested in coming to Finland. It would be a good idea if someone from IUPUI gave a similar presentation in Turku as well. It would probably help if the English students in Åbo Akademi would know about this option in good time so they would have time to think about it; it is a lot of work going to study abroad (especially USA) for six months or a year, so they would have to start in good time.
At first I was a bit suspicious about the living arrangements. I would be living with an American family and would not even have the option of living on campus. But living with a homestay family was not as bad as I feared, it actually really helped me to find out more about the American culture, I had many interesting discussions with the family and they were all very nice to me. I also met many of their friends, so socially speaking it was a good arrangement. The family I stayed with even helped me with some of the arrangements that might have been difficult for me to do on my own. They had a lovely lake-house an hour’s drive from Indianapolis, we spent a couple of weekends there and it was so much fun. The house was never empty and I got to meet a lot of interesting people. We would swim, make good food, barbeque and have long, interesting talks which certainly improved my conversational skills in English. We would also talk about culture a lot and compare Finnish and American traditions, culture, religion, art and so on which was very fascinating.
I also made friends at the workplace whom I hope to keep in touch with. I spent a lot of my free time with Alicia, one of my friends from work and we still write e-mails all the time. The campus had some nice apartments and I am sure it would have been nice to live there as well, but for a short period of two months it was probably the best way to stay with a homestay. However, if some students from Åbo Akademi go to study to IUPUI I recommend that they live on campus with the other students – that way transportation would not be a problem and the exchange student might make some more friends. Since the internship was in the summer, the campus was pretty empty and I did not meet that many other students, which was a shame because due to that I did not make that many friends at the university.
One of the big problems in Indianapolis was transportation; it was a nightmare trying to get around with the buses. It took me an hour to get to work by bus although it was only 8 km – with a car it took 10 minutes. The first month I used the buses which was very exhausting – it made my working days 10 hours long so I did not have any time to do anything else than work at the office so I rented a car which helped significantly. Without the car I would never had had the chance to participate in different events and really get to know American culture. I should have got the car from the beginning but that would have been way too expensive. Obviously, the Donner grant hardly even covered the flight, visa and public transportation so the car was paid for separately.
All in all, the internship taught me a lot both from an academic perspective but also, and as importantly, from a social point of view. Even though we have native speakers of English as our professors in Åbo Akademi, I rarely speak “everyday-English” with them; the discussions are always more or less “academic”, so this internship was a great opportunity for me to improve my English communication skills in different situations. I sincerely hope that I get the chance to go back to Indianapolis some day and meet all the people I made friends with. It is a shame that I will probably not have a chance to go to the exchange and study at IUPUI for a semester, since I already have finished my practice and would not get a grant – it would be way too expensive to pay for the exchange myself. However, I will strongly recommend this internship and the exchange program for my fellow students back in Åbo Akademi and I certainly hope someone will take this incredible opportunity; there were dozens of interesting courses and the students I met were all very nice so it would no doubt be an unforgettable semester. The language practice is a good way of making sure the students get first-hand experience from an English-speaking culture.