Author: Gloria Avalos

Confession: I am not a morning person. I kind of grumble like a bear at the world beyond my covers, especially the chipperness that exudes from my boyfriend Anthony, who has already been at his tasks since 5am. After consuming copious amounts of coffee over the course of two hours, I’m finally ready to start my day.

But once I’m up, I’m going!

My friends make fun of me for color-coding my day-planner for each activity and class, but it has saved me on more than one occasion. This semester has proven my craziest yet at MIIS, and I’ve been in a balancing act since day one. I’m a huge proponent of taking time to enjoy life, but this becomes tricky with a full course load and three jobs. Each weekday is vastly different for me- from work as a TA to babysitter to library GA to my courses in IEM and MPA, I have to map out my schedule in intricate detail. I’m also searching for practicum and DPMI+, making my life even more hectic.

Monday through Thursday, I start my day at 8am and don’t finish until at least 9pm, a rough but rewarding schedule. When I’m babysitting, I feel like I get a nice break from reality. The kid I watch is wise beyond his years, but young enough that nerf gun hide-and-seek is a daily occurrence. Turns out, I’m an excellent shot when it comes to nerf guns. As a TA, I help my IEM colleagues navigate the difficult world of program design and assessment. The best part of my TA job is watching students as the wheels turn, ideas click, and they jump into their work with newfound zeal. Working in the MIIS library is probably one of my favorite places, however, because I have the chance to be social and productive. I also have ridiculous fun placing our mascot gorilla in new and surprising places (watch your back!).

Secretly, I love being busy. I love the thrill of completing a challenging task and the feeling of exhaustion at the end of a long week. It makes my time off all the more rewarding, and motivates me to stay focused when I have to be. I’ve learned that my secret to productivity is having adventures planned for my downtime. In my busyness, I sometimes forget that I live in Monterey. My goal this semester has been to “live” where I live.

For example, last week, I finally went to a kickboxing class at the Sports Center. Talk about a workout! I learned kicks, punches, combos, and that I could probably handle myself in a fight. Or at least jump around a lot. A couple of weeks ago, Anthony took me climbing at the rock wall in Seaside — something I hadn’t done since I was 10. I looked like a total goober but with friends cheering you on, it’s pretty thrilling to make it up even the baby routes. Similarly, I played ultimate frisbee on the beach a couple of weeks ago. The sun was beaming, the waves were crashing, people appeared to be flying (seriously, these people can jump!), and I was yet again in awe of where I live.

I don’t know where I will end up in just a few short months, but I hope the place is as amazing and diverse as Monterey.

My  day starts by slowly waking up to NPR. I then finally get out of bed after getting a good dose of news, drink water, and kiss my wife to wake her up. I wash up and then go make us banana-peanut butter-protein shakes that I can’t live without (1 banana, 1 spoon of peanut butter, half a scoop of chocolate protein, ¾ cup of milk and 7-8 ice cubes). Depending on the weather, I drive my wife to her English class at Pacific Grove’s Adult Education School while listening to NPR’s Democracy Now. Many times I have to slow down because there are deer in the road (or terrible retired drivers). On the way back home I do my best to catch a glimpse of the beautiful bay. When I get back home I do physical therapy on my shoulder and start preparing/studying for today’s classes. After a morning class, I go pick up my wife while listening to NPR (Diane Rehm Show) once again. When we get home, I stop to marvel at the beauty of the 8 hummingbirds (including a baby) that are always flying around our lemon tree. Every time I get home and see the sunshine, flowers, lemon tree and humming birds around our house (in the middle of wintertime), I take a deep breath and smile, feeling so happy to live in sunny California. I quickly have lunch with my wife, do shoulder therapy again, and rush to classes. When I arrive in class I am pleased to greet the smiling faces of my friendly IEM classmates. Evening time involves a lot of studying, body-weight exercises while listening to James Brown (wishing I could dance more often), shower, dinner and wondering about my near future practicum/job. I go to bed around 11pm. Weekends involve: teaching a guitar lesson to a friend; “renting” a free Redbox movie;  Bboying (break dancing) at DJ Dialogic’s spot; visiting the Monterey Aquarium outside deck (to whale-otter-dolphin-sea lion-seal watch); biking to Pebble Beach; listening to 88.9 FM KUSP’s “Soul Shack”; cooking; pretending to be Brazilian; and visiting a nearby park to practice photography with my wonderful new wife as my model. The weekend ends by reviewing my never-ending to do list that includes hearing back from a Hip-Hop education conference proposal, informational interviews on crisis management, deciding on an international education program design client, and wondering constantly “what will my next job look like and when will I have more time to dance?!”.​

A day in the life of a Translation & Localization Management (TLM) student is pretty hard to predict, but for this particular student, on this particular day, it means that breakfast is spent wrangling with my computer over a software compatibility issue before rolling into Spanish translation class for a midterm. There are just seven of us in the class, and we share a stack of specialized dictionaries stacked at the middle of the table to help us get through a summary of the history of a Mexican arbitration court.

Once time is up, I head to my lunchtime meeting with the Globe Center, a student-managed localization business. We have a project manager for each language at the meeting along with our faculty advisor, who is also the head of the TLM program.

During the meeting we test out new applications to help us manage our projects and translators (also students, from the Translation & Interpretation program), get caught up on new projects coming down the pipeline, and talk about internal projects to work on like redesigning our website and updating the current translations on MIIS.edu. The meetings are only about an hour, and it’s always fun to be working with my TLM classmates. Unlike the Translation & Interpretation program, in TLM, although we study different languages, we still have all of our localization classes together.

Some students elect to take extra business classes to hone their managerial skills before leaving school. Many of the companies that we intern and work at are quite small, and you may be expected to help with aspects of the business besides just localization or project management. But there are also students in TLM who are more interested in the translation side of things, and so they take more translation classes and may even start working on freelance work in their free time.

But we’re all together for our localization classes, like my next class, video game localization. This is where the software-wrangling comes from: there are always unexpected hurdles to deal with when you’re talking about technology, but finally every student is able to get the Unity 3D game engine up and running on their computer, and we spend class poking through sample game projects and internationalizing the code behind them. When you internationalize something, you’re basically setting it up so that it can later be painlessly localized into a new language. Once we’ve successfully implemented internationalization techniques into one of today’s sample games, our homework assignment is to localize – that is, translate and implement – the game’s text into each of the eight languages studied at MIIS. So long as we can find all of the text that needs to be translated, we should be okay – assuming, of course, that the game still works in the end! And so it looks like my day might end the same way it started…