Virtual Internships Abroad Exploring Paris in My Virtual Internship

Booster2Success - Paris, France

In the last few weeks as an intern at Booster2Success, I have experienced French culture through the events and communication projects that I have been working on. This includes discovering a new Parisian neighborhood, new art, literature, and music that didn’t know despite having attended a French lycée in Washington DC. And in addition to this, I have improved and tested my organizational, creative thinking, and writing skills in the process. 

The agency organizes corporate team-building events, and with the pandemic, they had to adapt to a virtual setting. One of the projects that I have been working on is adapting one of these new online events, a live virtual tour of Montmartre in a game setting, for English-speaking clients. This project involved translating videos and quiz questions and challenges as well as promotional content and technical directions.

For the project, I experienced the virtual event and explored the famous Montmartre district, with its famous cabarets and the beautiful view of Paris from the Sacré-Coeur. I learned greatly about the neighborhood’s history as well as of its rich cultural heritage. Through a tour of its narrow streets, I visited the characteristic villas and windmills as well as the story of many artists who lived in and were inspired by Montmartre such as Renoir, Van Gogh, and Picasso. Among some of the unique stories and anecdotes associated with this district, my favorite was about a statue of the “Passe-Muraille”. It is a short story by the writer Marcel Aymé that describes the life of Monsieur Dutilleul, a Montmartre local who had the ability to walk through walls. The team-building activity summarized the story, but I still decided to read the novel afterward and loved it!

To finalize the task of adapting the event to English, I am recording a voice-over for the videos used in the live stream. It is a difficult task, especially being something that I have never done before, but I am enjoying it and it is helping me get out of my comfort zone as a non-native English speaker.

As for my other projects, I have continued to manage the social media posts as well as the Booster2Success blog, which is important to meet the agency’s Search Engine Optimization goals. Most interestingly, I have started a project of designing a virtual team-building event around the Olympics. This has been a more creative task that also demands getting familiar with different digital tools, so it’s been a great and fun learning experience. I am looking forward to completing it in my last week.

As I’m almost at the end of my virtual internship abroad, I can only say that I have loved this professional experience that allowed me to reconnect with a culture and work with a fantastic group of people.