Name: Evelyn Lai
Class Year: 2025
Major: Linguistics, Minor: Education
Hometown: Cupertino, California
Internship Organization: Transcendent Endeavors
Internship Title: Applied Linguistics Research Intern
Location: Remote
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
My work at Transcendent Endeavors consists of two aspects, the first is working on a digital platform, Canopy, whose main function is to eliminate the language barrier in healthcare by increasing language accessibility as means toward advancing diversity and health equity. Canopy focuses on developing medical Spanish and English curriculum, providing standardized language proficiency tests, and many more services to assist healthcare facilities in identifying and supporting qualified bilingual staff. My work within Canopy usually consists of applying linguistic knowledge to digital product development, which will encompass processes such as addressing issues and dependencies to move a product forward, reviewing and editing databases of Mandarin or English phrases for healthcare learning, and finding, organizing, and annotating a library of resources on the topic of language equity in healthcare.
The second part of my work consists of working with Blossom, which is a web based library of interactive eBooks for children delivered in a mixed language format. Blossom uses a translanguaging approach to gradually introduce new vocabulary and grammar structures in a target language. My work within Blossom typically deals with reviewing and tagging translated works for content and curriculum levels, as well as occasionally translating some content between English and Mandarin.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied for this internship because it combines my two academic/ career interests, linguistics and education, together! I thought it would be a great opportunity to explore a potential career in both fields that is not the traditional research or teacher pathway for each corresponding field.
I thought that working within Canopy would be an especially valuable experience that could give me insights and new familiarity to the work within the healthcare sector, and the teams equity driven mission also resonated heavily with me. In particular, coming from an immigrant background and experiencing the difficulty of translating medical terms from first hand experiences made the idea of working on the platform especially meaningful.
With Blossom, I thought that the opportunity to work on the curriculum side of education was intriguing, especially since it was dealing with bilingual texts which I dont often have the chance to explore. Ive always been interested in language acquisition and bilingual classrooms, so seeing the implementation of translanguaging into classroom content was something that drew me in to apply.
Was there anything special about how you found this internship?
My starting supervisor/person of contact for this internship was actually someone who had been a visiting professor at Haverford before so it was kind of a "full circle" moment to work with someone who had some familiarity with the Bi-co, and it was nice to have that connection!
What has been your favorite part of this internship?
My favorite part of the internship has been getting to learn more about the standards and regulations behind education curriculum. Since both aspects of the internship interact with teaching content, it's been eye opening to learn about why certain lessons or content need to be structured in specific manners, and it's helped me pay attention to aspects within education that I normally may have glossed over or not thought about.
Career & Civic Engagement Center Linguistics Education