Julian the Intern

Hi SpeaQ community,

I am Julian, the first intern at SpeaQ With Me. As a part of my studies I had to do an internship (I’m studying English and French and aiming to become a teacher in the future). I wanted to complete the internship in my hometown of Saarbrücken, where SpeaQ With Me is located.

Here I am with Patrick, at the BBQ of the "Starterzentrum"
Fun Fact: "Der Schwenker schwenkt den Schwenker auf dem Schwenker"
is an actual sentence in the local Saarbrücker dialect. It means the
the grill master grills a special kind of meat on this swinging grill. 

When looking for the internship, I came across a job posting website run by the local university. SpeaQ With Me’s ad on the site was the most interesting to me because I believe that you can’t learn a language without speaking it, either.

So I decided to contact the team. They presented the concept of SpeaQ With Me to me. I was very intrigued by the aims of the company. In the end I was told that I should expect a decision about two weeks later on whether or not I would get a spot as an intern. So a bit later I received a mail which said they wanted me to work with them, and I could start on September 1st.

When I first showed up, Kerstin showed me the office and the rest of the building. Later on we looked at what I could work on during my four weeks in the office. Among other things, I had to write a list of topics, that users of the website could be interested in or wanting to talk about. Another task was to translate the website into German, as it had only been developed in English so far.

The task that was the most interesting one to me, but one that was also quite stressful was to write a "language learning script". I had to come up with a scenario that I could write a dialogue about - similar to the dialogues in school books. But not only was I told to pen a simple conversation. I needed to include several chances for both, native speakers as well as language learners to alter its progression. Therefore, if you drew it on a piece of paper, the conversation would look like a tree. For Christian to be able to work with the script, I had to write it in a spread sheet. As you might imagine, I lost the overview quite quickly. But I'm proud of the result.

All in all, I had about eight or nine duties to take care of. I really appreciated that I didn’t have to finish them in a particular order. Thus I was able to work on different tasks throughout the day.

As them being a new startup, a lot of paperwork has to be done. I’m glad that I only had to copy a single document during my time here and I also only made some coffee once :) (that’s not usual for an intern in Germany).

I’ve really enjoyed my time here. Before, I’d never worked eight hours a day. But now I know that it isn’t too bad if you enjoy working with the people around you and if you’re able to change between more monotonous and motivating tasks. It really helped that I felt involved as well. I’ve never had to do anything that felt unimportant.

It’s been fascinating to see the app develop over these few weeks. Every day a new feature was added. The best ones are those I was involved in. Just sayin‘ ;).

Today is my last day, but I will surely keep track of what they are doing in the future and if I will be able to find my work on the platform later on.

Julian, the first intern at SpeaQ With Me

Bottom line:

After this month of work, I truly believe that I picked the right company for my internship. It included work I will never have to do as a teacher but it was really interesting to experience the work and organization of a startup, especially a language learning platform.