Combating ennui in virtual internships
Junior Cameron Garber has several strategies for make a virtual internship feel more like a traditional one.
This summer I’m interning for Creative Services Support Group, a charity organization based out of India that aims to give underprivileged children with interests in creative fields the resources they need in order to succeed.
The bulk of my work this summer so far comes down to editing letters sent by children to CSSG. CSSG has letters from hundreds of children from all around the world, written in all different languages, all of which have been translated into English by machine. I then take these machine-translated letters and edit them into grammatically correct English, while also maintaining the original voice and intention of the letter writer.
What has helped me with my work so far has been the experience I have in editing that I received through a class at IU. I took a class called Literary Editing and Publishing in fall 2020 that has given me the experience necessary to walk the fine line between editing for clarity and preserving voice and intent. One of the main focuses of that class was always being mindful of authorial intent. It is never an editor’s job to supersede the author, and the author’s vision should always be paramount and taken into consideration when any edits are being considered. An editor’s job is to recognize the author’s vision, refine it and help a reader more readily understand what the author is trying to convey, which usually involves cutting out distractions such as grammatical errors and tangents.
This work has been incredibly rewarding. Getting to read the letters of so many inspired children is heartwarming, to say the least. Almost all of the children have high aspirations — many want to be teachers, lawyers or politicians — but what I find especially wonderful is the universal kindness and selflessness of these children who were born less fortunate. Almost all of them want to achieve greatness in order to help those around them and prevent others from slipping into poverty as well. I think it goes to show how even the most dire of circumstances can’t diminish basic human kindness.