Dana
Ateneo de Manila University
In the past, the thought of having to work someday scared me a lot — especially the thought of having to sit down while staring at your desktop for hours. This experience of interning in ACOPIA, however, had definitely changed my perspective on having to work.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the promotion of the K-pop Summer Camp, formation of partnerships, and organization of meetups. Starting with the translation of the Japanese version of the said camp’s webpage into an English one, we divided the whole webpage amongst our small group of three in order to do it more efficiently. As a K-pop fan, this project became much easier to do because i was interested in it. I was able to apply my ‘knowledge’ in Korean pop in making the website that’s why I enjoyed doing the project very much.
After translating the whole K-pop Summer Camp webpage, we started working on several posters and videos for the promotion of the said camp. This is where it got exciting for me because through the creation of posters and videos for the K-pop camp, I was able to strengthen my skills in doing such things. As of the moment, we are promoting the said camp on social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
In addition to the task of promoting the camp, we were also assigned to join the group who organizes meetups. At first, we were unsure of what we were supposed to do because we haven’t gone to one yet and only heard stories from our groupmates, but thankfully, our groupmates were there to guide us through the preparation process of the meetup, carefully guiding us through everything we need to know. When the day of the meetup came, I was very nervous especially because Lia and I will be making Lumpiang Shanghai - a filipino dish that is similar to Vietnamese spring rolls. I was very scared of what it will turn out like because I have no experience in cooking at all. But during the process of cooking, my fellow interns were there with me so we were able to make the dish successfully. Director Cho even gave us a compliment saying the food smells good. Time went by really fast as we played games such as Uno, Killer Killer, and Jungle Speed. I met new friends and was able to learn more stuff about the culture of different countries. Even though there were only 2 people who came, I was really happy that night because I was able to see how much the people enjoyed the meetup that we organized.
Aside from the aforementioned duties, we also get to teach English to those who avail of ACOPIA’s multicultural classroom. As of the moment, I have one student who wants to learn English in order to communicate with foreigners that stay in her house for Homestay. Having to teach English is a very fulfilling experience because it makes me see how my knowledge and skills could help others.
The fun doesn’t stop here though because interning in ACOPIA comes with free Korean language classes and K-pop dance lessons. In the midst of all the workload that we have, we get some free time to do very exciting stuff such as those mentioned above. The Korean language class with 희정 선생님 is very fun and we always get to eat different kinds of Korean snacks in her class. On the other hand, 수영 선생님 ensures that we enjoy every dance class that we attend. So far, we were able to learn two songs already, namely: ‘3.6.5. by Triple H’ and ‘Rookie by Red Velvet’. The experience of learning K-pop dance choreography with friends is a truly exciting part that one must not miss.
This intern experience with ACOPIA made me realize that it doesn’t matter whether you’d have to sit down in front of your computer for hours because you won’t even notice the time passing by if you’re really into the job. In addition, interning in ACOPIA lets you practice different skills that would surely prepare one for work after college.
