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On my first days at PT Bank Central Asia Tbk (BCA), I thought I already knew what my internship would look like. I was joining as a Chinese Linguist, so naturally, I expected my biggest challenge to be finding the right Mandarin words for banking documents. That turned out to be only the beginning.<\/p>\n
Once the work started, I realized that a form was never just a form. The wording could shape how a customer understood a requirement. A refund request could involve several operational steps. A large collective account-opening project could turn into a coordination puzzle between branches and head-office teams. Even a monthly dashboard was more than a set of numbers; it was a way to make ongoing work easier to see, discuss, and manage.<\/p>\n
I joined BCA in February 2026 for a year-long internship with the Operation Strategy and Development Group (GPOL), or Grup Strategi & Pengembangan Operasi<\/em>\u00a0Layanan<\/em>, as part of the BINUS ASO School of Engineering Enrichment Program. My formal role is Chinese Linguist, but over the months, the experience has taken me well beyond translation and into the day-to-day reality of banking operations.<\/p>\n One of my main responsibilities is translating banking forms for individual and corporate customers into professional Mandarin. From the outside, the task sounds simple: understand the Indonesian or English sentence, find the Mandarin equivalent, check the grammar, and move on. In banking, it is rarely that simple.<\/p>\n A small wording choice can change the meaning of a document. One example that stayed with me was the difference between \u201cGaji\u201d and \u201cPenghasilan.\u201d In everyday conversation, both may be loosely understood as income. In a banking context, however, \u201cGaji\u201d points more specifically to salary or wages, while \u201cPenghasilan\u201d can cover a broader range of income sources. Translating both with the same Mandarin term could make an important distinction disappear.<\/p>\n That was when translation started to feel less like replacing one set of words with another and more like solving a communication problem. I had to think about terminology, context, legal meaning, consistency, and how a Mandarin-speaking customer might interpret the document. The work also brought me into discussions with BCA\u2019s Legal team and into efforts to make terminology more standardized and reusable across forms.<\/p>\n Knowing the language helped me translate the document. Understanding the process helped me see why every word mattered.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n As the internship progressed, my responsibilities expanded. Alongside translation, I handled special administrative fee refunds and auto-collection fee refunds, supported collective account-opening processes, communicated with branches and head-office teams, and prepared monthly reporting dashboards.<\/p>\n The variety made the work interesting, but it also taught me something I had not expected: sometimes the hardest part is not completing a task. It is deciding what needs your attention first.<\/p>\n There were days when several assignments arrived at once. A collective account-opening request could be urgent because it directly affected a corporate customer. A refund case might be connected to a complaint or service adjustment. Translation needed concentration and precision, but some documents had a longer planning horizon. I learned to look at deadlines and operational impact together, then set priorities without treating accuracy as something that could be sacrificed.<\/p>\n That shift changed the way I worked. Instead of seeing my to-do list as a collection of separate assignments, I started asking a different set of questions: Who is waiting for this? What happens if this is delayed? Which team needs the information next? What is missing before the process can move forward? Those questions made my work more structured and, at the same time, much more connected to the people behind each task.<\/p>\n This was also the point where my Business Engineering studies at BINUS started to feel much more tangible. In class, we often discuss process improvement, data, project management, and problem-solving as separate topics. At BCA, I could see them happening at the same time.<\/p>\n A translation issue could become an operational issue. An operational issue could require coordination. Coordination could expose a bottleneck. That bottleneck could be improved through a clearer workflow, and the result still had to be monitored and communicated through reporting. Suddenly, the concepts I had learned were no longer separate boxes in a course outline; they were parts of the same working system.<\/p>\n Dashboards made this especially clear. The goal was not simply to place data on a screen. The real question was whether the information helped supervisors and related teams understand what was happening more quickly. A dashboard that is technically complete but difficult to read is not very useful. The same principle applies to processes: if people cannot easily understand what needs to happen next, the process may be correct on paper but still inefficient in practice.<\/p>\n Communication became part of that systems view as well. Customers, branches, GPOL, and head-office teams can look at the same process from very different positions. I often found myself moving between those perspectives, trying to understand what each side needed and helping keep the information aligned. That, to me, is one of the most practical forms of Business Engineering: connecting the process, the data, and the people who actually use them.<\/p>\n From Theory to Real-World Thinking<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a strange difference between understanding something in class and finally seeing why it matters.<\/p>\n At university, problems usually arrive with some kind of structure. There is a case to analyze, a question to answer, a framework to use, and eventually, a deadline to meet. You know there is a problem because someone has already told you there is one.<\/p>\n Work feels different.<\/p>\n Sometimes, no one tells you where the problem is. You notice it because a process takes longer than expected. Because the same question keeps coming back. Because a number on a dashboard looks unusual. Because one team is waiting for information that another team did not realize they needed to send.<\/p>\n And sometimes, the task itself is not really the task.<\/p>\n A dashboard is not just about arranging numbers neatly on a screen. It is about whether someone can look at those numbers and quickly understand what is happening.<\/p>\n A translation is not finished simply because every sentence is grammatically correct. The wording still has to make sense in context, carry the right meaning, and work for the person who will eventually read it.<\/p>\n A process can look perfectly fine on paper and still feel complicated for the people actually moving through it.<\/p>\n These were small realizations, but they slowly changed the way I approached my work.<\/p>\n I started looking at data differently. Instead of asking only, \u201cWhat does this number show?\u201d I became more interested in \u201cWhy does it look this way?\u201d and \u201cWhat does someone need to understand from it?<\/p>\n I started looking at processes differently too. Not just as a sequence of steps, but as a series of handovers between people. Somewhere between one step and the next, information can get lost, priorities can shift, and delays can happen.<\/p>\n That is where I began to understand something I had heard many times at university but had never fully experienced: analysis is only valuable when it leads somewhere.<\/p>\n Seeing a problem is useful. Understanding why it happens is better. But eventually, someone has to decide what to do next.<\/p>\n The same realization changed how I think about communication.<\/p>\n Working with different teams taught me that being clear does not automatically mean being understood. A branch, a head-office team, and a customer can all be looking at the exact same process from completely different angles. What feels obvious to one person may be completely new to another.<\/p>\n So I learned to ask more questions. To pay attention to context. To think about what the other person actually needs before deciding what information to give them.<\/p>\n And perhaps the biggest change has been much quieter than all of that.<\/p>\n I have become more aware of what happens after my part is done.<\/p>\n Who receives this next?<\/p>\n What are they waiting for?<\/p>\n What happens if I miss a detail?<\/p>\n Could I make the next step easier?<\/p>\n It sounds simple, but this was something I did not fully understand when most of my work happened inside classrooms and assignments.<\/p>\n University taught me frameworks, systems, data, and ways to approach problems. BCA is teaching me what happens when those ideas meet deadlines, different perspectives, incomplete information, and people who depend on one another to keep things moving.<\/p>\n Looking back, I do not think the biggest lesson has been learning how to complete more tasks.<\/p>\n It has been learning to see more around the task itself.<\/p>\n And maybe that is what becoming more professional has meant for me so far; not having all the answers, but becoming better at noticing what matters before deciding what to do next.<\/p>\n What I\u2019ll Carry Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n The interesting thing about an internship is that you usually walk in with a job description.<\/p>\n You know your title. You know roughly what you are expected to do. You imagine the skills you will use, the people you will meet, and perhaps even the kind of experience you will have.<\/p>\n Then the actual work begins, and the job description becomes only part of the story.<\/p>\n When I first joined BCA, I thought being a Chinese Linguist would define most of my experience. And in many ways, language is still where everything started. It gave me a role, a responsibility, and a place to contribute.<\/p>\n But over time, my days became harder to describe with just one title.<\/p>\n I started to understand that becoming more professional is not always about doing something bigger or more impressive. Sometimes, it came in a simpler way.<\/p>\n It is remembering to follow up.<\/p>\n It is catching a detail before it becomes someone else\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n It is knowing when to ask for help.<\/p>\n It is taking responsibility for your part while still understanding that your work is connected to someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n And I did not figure all of this out on my own.<\/p>\n I\u2019m grateful to Prof. Dr. Eng. Fergyanto E. Gunawan, Head of the Business Engineering Program, my faculty supervisor, Mr. Marcel Saputra, and my BCA Site Supervisor, Mr. Hardyan Adika Noor. Their guidance has helped me navigate the space between being a student who is still learning and a professional who is expected to contribute.<\/p>\n That space, I think, is where most of the growth has happened.<\/p>\n I am still learning. I still ask questions. I still encounter things I have never dealt with before. But I no longer see that as something I need to hide. If anything, this internship has made me more curious about what I do not know, and more confident about figuring it out.<\/p>\n I came to BCA thinking I would spend my internship translating words.<\/p>\n Instead, I found myself learning how information moves, how people work together, how small decisions affect a larger process, and how much there is to notice once you start looking beyond your own task.<\/p>\n Maybe that is what I will carry with me most.<\/p>\n I started this internship learning how to translate what was in front of me. Somewhere along the way, I also learned to look beyond it.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On my first days at PT Bank Central Asia Tbk (BCA), I thought I already knew what my internship would look like. I was joining as a Chinese Linguist, so naturally, I expected my biggest challenge to be finding the right Mandarin words for banking documents. That turned out to be only the beginning. Once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"featured_image":{"phone":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/business-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/Capture-480x268.jpg","tablet":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/business-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/Capture.jpg"},"yoast_head":"\nTranslation Was Only the Starting Point<\/h2>\n
Learning to See the Process Behind the Task<\/h2>\n
Where Business Engineering Started to Click<\/h2>\n
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