First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to the donors of the Faculty of Arts Internship Award, for their generosity which allows students to engage with their studies hands-on throughout their summers. This award allowed me to engage with an opportunity I otherwise would not have been able to finance, creating a transformative, enriching, and invaluable experience. The Faculty of Arts Internship Award has allowed me to develop immensely in my educational and professional life and has aided me in understanding how I will move the learning I have done in my Undergraduate Degree into my post-grad life.
I am headed into my final semester at McGill where I have had the pleasure to study Psychology with a minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. While these fields may not seem incredibly connected, LACS is an interdisciplinary department that has allowed me to explore the ways in which my studies in Psychology inform my understanding of different fields such as Politics, Economic Policy, and Cultural Studies. In conjunction, these fields of studies have brought me to my true passion: advocacy and policy. After graduation, I hope to continue my education by attending Law School.
The internship I selected for the summer is a journalism internship with the Latin American News Digest—a small organization which aims to disseminate Latin American news to English Speakers directly from Latin American journals. By translating the original articles, the Latin American News Digest hopes to share true Latin American opinions and highlight stories which get attention in Latin America but never reach North American and English-Speaking audiences. My duties as an intern included translating Spanish-language articles into condensed English-language pieces. Going into the internship I hoped to refine my skills in Spanish English translation, improve my journalistic writing, and deepen my understanding of Latin America as a region. I worked closely with texts that engage with theatre, justice, politics, social media, tourism, and more which absolutely broadened my understanding of the region.
The most exciting moment of this internship for me was handing in my Aggregation, which was a self-led research project during July where I selected a collection of articles surrounding the subject of my choice, in my case the future of Latin American Literature, how it is politicized, AI’s impact, and other recent literary news. Being able to select what news I felt was worth sharing was incredibly exciting, and digging through many different small journals from across the region was an exciting way to grow my understanding of how media spreads from country to country.
One thing that felt challenging was knowing how to improve on a more holistic level. Receiving feedback from piece-to-piece often was incredibly specific to each individual article, meaning at first glance I felt like I was unsure of how to apply it to new situations. With time and careful consideration though, I found myself growing more attuned to the underlying issues of the errors, rather than the specific example.
I will continue to engage with this internship in the coming semester as I take the LACS Internship Course. Professor Yann le Polain de Waroux will be supervising my research paper which will be investigating differences between Latin American stories which have been covered within the region, compared to Latin American stories which have been covered by North American companies. I will be engaging closely with a handful of stories and using critical discourse analysis to see if over-arching narratives are reinforced by linguistic decisions, and their implications on where we should source our news from.
The funds I received allowed me to set aside adequate unpaid time to engage in this internship without falling behind on my budgeting for rent, tuition, and living costs.
I would like to, once again, extend my gratitude to the donors of the Faculty of Arts Internship Award.
Thank you!
