When the time came to choose her path for the 5th semester of her BA in Applied Languages, it was clear to Alina Anto what she wanted to do: gain work experience! That’s the reason why she opted for an internship. As her specialization is Multilingual Communication, she thought an international environment would be the best choice.
The Company
I worked as an intern in the Content & Communications Department at InterNations in Munich. The company focuses on making life easier for expats and with 2.4 million members in 390 cities around the world, InterNations is the largest global network and information site for people who live and work abroad. The company offers global and local networking both online and face-to-face. At monthly events and activities, expats have the opportunity to meet with other global minds. Online services include discussion forums to help members with topics such as local housing and job searching, guest contributions about life abroad, as well as country and city guides. This is where the Content & Communications Department comes into play.
My Tasks
The Content & Communications Department at InterNations is responsible for all of the content on the InterNations website. The country and city guides offer members helpful information on their new homes. These articles include topics like housing, taxes, education, culture and more. To ensure that the information is current, the articles are updated on a regular basis. Updating articles includes a lot of research and fact-checking, because, for example, economies are always changing. Therefore, the “Recherchieren” course in the first year of university came in quite handy. In addition, it includes a lot of proofreading and making sure the articles are reader-friendly as well as adhering to the latest SEO standards. Apart from updating guide articles, I also had the chance to write new extended guide articles from scratch. During my time there, we created a new extended guide for Switzerland, and I was responsible for writing the Transport & Driving as well as the Culture, Shopping & Recreation categories.
I also wrote some articles on different aspects of expat life for the InterNations Expat Magazine and the blog. This was quite interesting, as I had the opportunity to write about something I found important, and I could be more creative than usual. In addition to this, since I was the only intern with German as my mother tongue, I also translated different SEO landing pages as well as press releases into German. Some of the less frequent tasks included proofreading interviews in French or translating interviews into French, analyzing email traffic and “brand heroes”, as well as taking part in different internal projects.
Conclusion
Even though I don’t think I want to pursue a career in content management since for me, personally, it involves too much writing, it was, nevertheless, an interesting experience. I learned a lot about the English language, SEO standards and content management systems, different places all around the world and working in an international team.
Since the 2015 autumn semester, students following the specializations in Multilingual Communication and Multimodal Communication in the BA in Applied Languages can spend their fifth semester doing an internship. Further reports will be appearing over the next few months under the heading: “Praktikum”.