As an English language and literature major, I had wanted to stay at English-speaking countries to improve my English abilities. Last April, I received a message about a 2018 summer eight-week overseas internship program which is hosted and supported by the CORE project of Chonnam National University (CNU) through CNU’s mobile application. I thought it was a good opportunity for me. Therefore, I applied for it and was selected as an intern who works at a company or an institution in the U.S.

More Motivated by Relationships
    There were some companies and institutions that students can earn work experience in Salt Lake City and San Diego. I decided to go to an elementary school in San Diego. After I had an interview with the president of the school on July 25 I started to work as an assistant teacher. I helped teachers, played with students and taught them English, Korean and Mathematics for one month.
    While I worked at the school, I felt several feelings and realized some things. The children were very cute and lovely. However, they were not perfect at using English and had used broken words and pronounced inaccurately. It was more difficult for me to understand what they said than what adults did. Since then, I thought I should study English harder. Nevertheless, language was not that important in my relationship with the children. When I loved them truly, they also showed me true love. It was fantastic! I was touched very much by their warm love. Especially, when they hugged me, I thought that I was in the heaven. I felt that a true heart is the most important thing in relationships with other people.

Growth Through Experience
    After I had worked at the school for one month, I changed the internship institution due to the school vacation. I started to work at Five Star Tours. It is a company that provides tours and luggage storage services for customers. There, I searched for and organized some information, treated customers and their calls and translated its English homepage into Korean.
    While I was working at the tour company, I realized once more that I should study English much harder to improve my English listening and speaking abilities. I had to treat customers and their calls. In the case of face to face talking, I could keep a conversation with other people through nonverbal things such as atmosphere, context, mouth movement and body language. However, when I got a call, I could not use those things. Therefore, it was hard for me to treat customers’ calls at first. I thought I should study English much harder. Secondly, I made up my mind to do my best to learn about something. As the company was busy, there was no one to take care of me. Therefore, if I did not try to find and do my role by myself, I would not learn anything from there.
    I hope this article is interesting and helpful for readers who want to join an overseas internship program. I want to tell them there are many opportunities that students can grab. Don’t be afraid and just catch good chances to experience work and employment.
 

By Park Seon-ah, Student Editor