Witlingo is looking for two college interns who can start work by April 1st, 2021.
1 – Both positions are paid.
2 – Both positions are remote.
3 – Pay will be negotiated and will be in function of the number of hours the interns are available to devote on a weekly basis, as well as their skill level. The interns will have an opportunity to learn and grow, but they will be expected to deliver on the tasks that are assigned to them.
4 – The internships start April 1st, 2021 and end June 30th, 2021. Renewal for an additional 3 months (July-September) is possible, depending on the performance of the intern and budget availability.
5 – All work will be done using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Drawings, Drive, etc., and other online Google instruments.
6 – Both internships will require a great deal of writing. The interns will need to either be comfortably solid writers, or are willing to work hard to become comfortably solid writers. The interns will fail if they see writing as a chore they wish they didn’t need to do. The interns need to either enjoy writing or enjoy working hard to become better writers.
7 – Both internships will require collaboration with other Witlingo team members and partners outside of Witlingo. The interns are expected to have collaboration skills.
8. If you are interested, please send an email to internships@new.witlingo.com.
Intern #1: An Anthropology or Linguistics major with interest in Ethnographic work
a. We are looking for someone who first and foremost is comfortable speaking with people over the telephone and via Zoom — or someone who is willing to break out of their shyness and learn how to engage other people in live, 1-1 conversations.
b. The intern will be speaking mainly with seniors in assisted living homes who own and use a smart speaker (for instance, Amazon Echo or Google Home) on a daily basis. So, the ability to speak with people from a different (much older) generation is crucial.
c. The intern will be engaging with seniors both formally (questionnaires and carefully designed surveys) and informally (chatting about life in general to understand the full life context of the seniors).
d. The intern will collect the information they gather through interviews, and will organize the information so that analyses can be carried out by the Witlingo product team. The intern will be asked to write several summary reports (3-4 pages long) and to provide their own insights and analyses.
e. The intern will be involved directly with the Witlingo product team to provide first-hand details about their conversations with the seniors.
f. The intern will be asked to share their thoughts and opinions on Witlingo products and solutions that are being considered for development for the seniors.
f. The intern will be the voice of the end user and their champion and they need to enjoy playing that role.
g. The intern will be successful if they are curious, are able to build relationships with the seniors, pay attention to what the seniors are telling them, take good notes, and are able to provide insight beyond surface observations. They need to be able to not only detect dots but connect them.
h. The intern will be given ample room to be creative: they need to be disciplined and respect and follow processes, but are also expected to suggest new ways of doing things, should they see something that can be improved upon (better tools, optimized processes, etc.).
Intern #2: A History, Journalism, or English major
a. We are looking for someone who will help us track the development of the Voice First space after the launch of the Amazon Echo in November 2014 by collecting information on: (a) The people who are actively building, evangelizing, financing, commenting on, the growth of the space; (b) The companies that are the key players in the space as well as new startups that have been launched (including the ones that have gone under); (c) The technologies that have been delivered (including the ones that have not succeeded); (d) The solutions that have been deployed and the companies that have deployed them; and (e) The events that have been launched and that bring the Voice First community together.
b. The intern will be compiling a running list of the main actors, entities, and the important events in the timeline of Voice First, starting from November 2014, with the aim of capturing the details that are often lost in the telling of a story by future historians.
c. The intern is comfortable speaking with people over the telephone and via Zoom — or someone who is willing to break out of their shyness and learn how to engage other people in live, 1-1 conversations.
d. The intern needs to be disciplined and patient: this is a data gathering operation and they need to be able to gather that data in a way that is going to be usable by future historians.
e. The intern needs to be able to know how to gather data and archive data that would not be easily retrievable in the future otherwise: for instance, collecting articles that are published is not as valuable as, say, recording that a member of the voice first community who started a thread on twitter, had triggered a set of activities that led to the launch of an organization. Such detail would be easily lost in the flow of things. Consistently noting down such details and tagging the information so that later on a future historian or journalist is able to trace detailed events (for instance the back and forth that gave birth of the organization to the twitter thread is the kind of output that we are looking for) is key.
f. The intern needs to be active on and comfortable with Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube. They need to also be comfortable with Slack and need to join the emerging Clubhouse app, if they have not already joined in.
g. The intern needs to understand that their role is to observe and note down and to stay away from participating actively in the community. To the extent that participation may help them gain access to information in any given instance, they should engage, but their primary role is that of an observer.
h. The intern will be the record gatherer and keeper on the rise of an important phase in the history of technology and they need to enjoy doing their best contributing to this important task.
i. The intern will be given ample room to be creative: they need to be disciplined and respect and follow processes, but are also expected to suggest new ways of doing things, should they see something that can be improved (better tools, optimized processes, etc.) upon.