This edition of From Our Eyes spotlights Aleks Lam (’27 Cultural Anthropology major, Chinese minor), who spent the summer interning at an International School in Yokohama, Japan. Lam discovered he had more in common with the families he worked with than expected and unleashed a new passion.
This summer, I had the opportunity to intern at Valor International School in Yokohama for one month. The catch? I have never been to Japan, and I don’t speak a lick of Japanese. What I was armed with before I went was a good amount of experience teaching English to second-language learners, and a wagonload of enthusiasm. What I came back with (besides a very heavy suitcase of gifts and souvenirs) was a strengthened self-confidence and a clearer vision of a potential future career.
I worked with Valor International School, a newly opened faith-based international school that specializes in welcoming children who are unfamiliar with or transitioning from the Japanese school system. The Japanese school system is notoriously rigorous, and students from non-Japanese backgrounds or mixed-race families often struggle to make friends and maintain their bilingual fluency in traditional Japanese schools. Thus, Valor has a special focus on supporting third culture and bilingual students — students whose childhoods closely resemble my own.
At Valor, I primarily served as a teaching aide for English class, though I also assisted the students in math and art, and served lunch/recess duty. As Valor is a new institution, I developed social media strategies with the marketing lead and coordinated an event with Valor’s co-founders.
The highlight of my internship was the event I planned: a bilingual family movie night for students, prospective families, and the wider Nokendai community. As the concept of a “family movie night” at school is uncommon in Japan, part of our marketing strategy was to spread awareness of what the expectations for the event were — that it would be a casual, free event, that children we
re welcome to run around and play, and that parents were allowed to stay and socialize. Along with simple tasks like buying snacks, a projector, and running basic tech for the movie night, I also got to interact with both English- and Japanese-speaking families who were curious about the school’s programs.
At the beginning of my internship, I was so unsure how to operate in a country where I didn’t even have conversational fluency in the language. However, working with other third-culture students and families uplifted me and really strengthened my resolve. I saw their own struggles in trying to “make it” in a culture they didn’t fully understand or fit into, and I saw my own journey to the United States mirrored in their perseverance. Working in Yokohama helped me uncover a passion for cross-cultural work and communication in my own life. I also enjoy working with children in an educational setting. With my major in Cultural Anthropology and the experience from this internship, I hope to work in environments that facilitate cross-cultural relationships and bring people from different nationalities together.
Pictured in header: Aleks Lam (’27 Cultural Anthropology major, Chinese minor) works with a student in Japan at his summer internship. (Photo courtesy of Lam).
