{"id":5264,"date":"2026-08-30T16:45:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/?p=5264"},"modified":"2026-08-30T16:47:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:47:05","slug":"czarnota-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/2026\/08\/30\/czarnota-29\/","title":{"rendered":"Czarnota ‘ 29 | English Dept."},"content":{"rendered":"
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I am an international student at Wabash College graduating in 2029. In this reflection, I would like to summarize the experience I have had with my first official summer internship as well as express my gratitude for receiving this
meaningful opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The professor I have had the privilege to assist was Agata Szczeszak\u2013Brewer, and the
project I was involved in required me to produce transcriptions of interviews, crucial for a new book my supervisor is working on. To be more precise, my job was to carefully
listen to conversations, recorded either through an internet call, or in person by the
professor, and recreate them in text format. The purpose of my task was to simplify the
process of filtering out the useful pieces of the interviews and presenting the fragments of interest to the interviewees, who are to approve the excerpts chosen for the book <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A particularly interesting thing about this internship opportunity was that I was able to use a part of my identity, which I do not often get to express studying in the US, in a professional setting. Namely, my Polish nationality. Professor Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, being Polish herself, is working on a book representing different faces of the phenomenon of Polish migration into the US. For this reason, the majority of the interviews I transcribed were in my first language. The chosen excerpts will still be translated to English, but I am really glad I got to use this specific skill to help produce a piece of literary work that will be published in a foreign country. Moreover, I felt that this internship opportunity was very intriguing on a personal level, as I found myself curious to find out more about the different reasons people of the same nationality chose to migrate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the difficulties of this project was reading and translating the intentions, and expressions of the interviewees into appropriate annotations, such as \u201ctaking a deep breath\u201d, or \u201csaid enthusiastically\u201d, which made it a bit clearer what emotions the discussed topic could be associated with. Making sure to include such little details made this task a little more challenging, as it required practicing observational acuity and interpretive skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A very useful aspect that I got to learn about thanks to this experience was the professional etiquette around personal stories and vulnerable information. It was very important to not share the stories I got to hear with anybody to respect the privacy of the interviewees. This included not feeding the information to any AI software that could have theoretically prepared the transcriptions automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can confidently say that my summer internship was a valuable learning experience. Apart from purely technical skills, such as time management, which was crucial, as preparing transcriptions can be a very time-consuming and repetitive process, I got to practice a set of soft skills, such as empathy, professionalism, and intellectual curiosity. I would like to sincerely thank the donors that made it possible for me to work for Professor Szczeszak-Brewer and assist with this project, that, apart from providing an amazing learning experience, was very meaningful on a personal level<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am an international student at Wabash College graduating in 2029. In this reflection, I would like to summarize the experience I have had with my first official summer internship as well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":195,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-summer-internships","category-academic-research"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/08\/image-27.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/195"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5268,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264\/revisions\/5268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}