Mel Lin

I participated in the Strasbourg Summer Community Internship Program as an intern at an animation studio called Nojo. I also lived with a host family and explored museums and galleries in Strasbourg. I met a lot of cool people both at my internship and outside it, and ate a lot of Vietnamese food. At the studio, I helped with finding donors for crowdfunding, and I also helped design some flyers and attended meetings. I really enjoyed getting to meet people through my internship and my host family and walking around Strasbourg. 

I feel like most of the people I met were politically far left, but I heard there are a lot of far rights in France. Besides that, people in France really focus on making mass media meaningful. The public media is more down-to-earth, but their private media can be more for entertainment or just for enjoyment. Their shows and movies lean more towards the education and awareness side compared to what I normally watch. Everyone I talked to urged me to keep up with current events, so I learned a lot through them. I’m grateful that they would keep me up to date on world events from time to time because I don’t have a great attention span. On another note, my host mom told me that she understands when my roommate speaks English but not me, and we’re both American. 

My French skills improved a lot during my time in Strasbourg. I wrote a 12-page paper at the end of my internship, and I can think more spontaneously and speak louder in French. I also practiced my “R”s a lot. At the studio, I tried a variety of things, and I discovered that I do not like doing stop motion animation, frame-by-frame animation, or research although I am very capable of those things. I still really like editing and compositing. All parts of the team are important, but I only like to edit and composite. It was very fruitful, and now I have a lot more experience to add to my resume. 

I found a book called “Terre des oublis” by Dương Thu Hương at my favorite cafe. Unfortunately, I could not take it with me. It was a gift to the cafe owner. Thus, I will look for a copy of it somewhere and I would like to read the entire book in French. I want to improve my French skills so that I can be a better translator, so I will create some writing samples and contribute to some translation projects that I find online.