Meet the Acclaro Interns: Isela Mosqueira
In our “Meet the Acclaro Interns” series, we introduce you to undergraduate and graduate students who held intern positions with us during the summer of 2022.
Isela Mosqueira grew up in Hollister, California, where she participated in theater and many sports, including swimming, softball, color guard, and track and field.
Isela attended the University of California Santa Cruz from 2007 to 2011, where she majored in Language Studies with a concentration of Spanish. Following graduation, she moved to Barcelona, Spain where she studied and worked as a full-time private English teacher.
Isela’s Acclaro internship
Isela is a Project Management Intern assigned to a single Acclaro account. She helps expand her team’s resources, onboarding new linguists, sending linguist purchase orders and organizing past job information for the client. In addition, she implements changes on how we provide feedback to our linguists to maximize quality.
Isela begins her day by reading emails and prioritizing the most urgent handoffs. She issues purchase orders and answers emails. “Next, I attend meetings with either my supervisor, my team, or with the other interns while we learn about the inner workings of all the departments at Acclaro,” says Isela.
Her afternoons are usually dedicated to ongoing projects, as most of her team and linguists are in time zones that result in few afternoon handoffs.
Explaining localization to a family member
When asked how she’d explain localization to a family member, Isela provided this answer:
“Localization means to tailor the look, feel, and message of a product to a target culture. It goes far beyond the translation of words, and involves ensuring that the message (i.e., content), images, colors, and design are all appropriate for the target culture.”
Isela’s takeaways from her internship
In Isela’s own words, here are things she learned from the Acclaro intern experience:
Be comfortable with not knowing the answer. “Many projects and tasks I worked on were things being changed or worked on for the first time, so I didn’t always have someone I could go to with questions about how to execute a task! Be creative with research and don’t be afraid of trying out new solutions. Reach out to colleagues to be thought partners and to your team or supervisor to make sure your ideas are in line with the team’s goals.”
Over-communicate! “All stakeholders involved in a project – from PM colleagues to linguists to engineers – will appreciate it if you communicate every step of the way. They feel like they are kept in the loop and aren’t surprised by anything sneaking up on them. It is a valuable habit to get into!”
Isela’s take on the Acclaro culture
Isela appreciates the culture of knowledge sharing at Acclaro. Project managers from different accounts regularly post in a company-wide Microsoft Teams channel, asking for advice on how to tackle an issue, while engineers ask for feedback on system updates.
According to Isela, “It’s so seldom to join a company and get immediate good vibes from everyone you meet – that’s Acclaro! Everyone I talk to across all teams always say how much they love working with their team and how great everyone is. Those positive vibes really make a difference in the work experience.”
Isela enjoyed interacting with numerous teams in the company, from in-depth projects she worked on for her team, to the overviews given to interns from every department at Acclaro. She learned how every department interacts with each other and had opportunities to ask questions and have conversations with company leaders from the start.
“I also loved the feeling that I was bringing real value to my team. I was trusted with processes that the rest of my team and the team of linguists would depend on and after a short amount of time I became the person that team members would come to with questions or help. Feeling indispensable as an intern is incredible,” says Isela.
