Meet the Acclaro Interns: Jocelyn Kwong
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.
Jocelyn Kwong lives in San Francisco, California. She loves walking in San Francisco, with its amazing views and vistas. Jocelyn is a competitive swimmer who started playing water polo in college. She recently started swimming in the San Francisco Bay and completed the Escape from Alcatraz swim in early August.
Jocelyn’s Acclaro internship
This summer Jocelyn was assigned to one Acclaro account and worked with a dedicated Acclaro mentor. According to Jocelyn, “We worked out a system where each week was adding a new part of the workflow with the account. I started with delivering projects and slowly worked my way around to quality assurance (QA) and even had a part in generating purchase orders.”
On a typical day, Jocelyn starts work at 8am. “We have team members working in Thailand, Argentina and Brazil. They will have set up the tracking sheets for the day before I log in, so I’ll go through to check on the sheets and follow up with deliveries as needed,” says Jocelyn.
In addition, Jocelyn uses the morning to check email and attend scheduled meetings. She also has 1:1 meetings with her Acclaro mentor. In the afternoon, Jocelyn focuses her time on delivering on projects. Her day usually concludes by 5pm.
According to Jocelyn, “This internship has helped me figure out different learning styles and practical methods to quickly get up to speed on processes or information. For learning new things, it really helps if I can share my screen and work through new processes with someone observing, which is kinesthetic-type learning.”
Jocelyn’s college journey
Jocelyn graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. in Chinese Language and Culture. She completed her capstone year with the Flagship program in Nanjing and Shanghai, China. After returning to San Francisco, she worked in a mandarin immersion school.
Jocelyn became interested in localization and applied to a graduate program at Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in Monterey, California. She loves that localization bridges languages, culture, people and technology. Jocelyn has one year remaining in her graduate program at MIIS.
Explaining localization to a family member
When asked how she’d explain localization to a family member, Jocelyn provided this answer:
“While translation is the process of changing text into another language, localization does a little bit more and adapts a product or a service to a specific culture and language. At the end of the localization process, the product or service should look and feel as if it was made in and made for users of that specific culture and language.”
Jocelyn’s take on the Acclaro intern experience
The Acclaro internship was Jocelyn’s first experience in a remote working arrangement. Going into the internship, she was nervous about feeling isolated. Jocelyn was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was to communicate across the team.
“Everyone has been really supportive and my team communicates on a regular basis in chat or in meetings. Even in the larger meetings and training, everyone has been really welcoming and accessible,” says Jocelyn.
Jocelyn’s favorite part about her internship at Acclaro was being able to apply lessons and theory that she learned at MIIS to real-world projects. She cherished the 1:1 time she got with her mentor, who always made time for meetings and quick check-ins.
According to Jocelyn, “I loved being able to ask about her experiences, for example, working in different language service providers (LSPs), and how she manages different accounts and teams. If there was something that I wanted more clarification on, she would take the time to answer all of my questions and work through my ideas.”
Best wishes with your final year at graduate school, Jocelyn!
