How Identity Has Influenced A Senior Content Program Manager's Career At An Edtech Company
Sasha's bicultural and bilingual background, honed in a household with an immigrant parent, provided invaluable skills in navigating career challenges. This experience enabled Sasha to understand nuances in student populations and international teams, illustrated by their ability to identify subtle translation issues—"like, if we have a multiple choice question and our answers are like red, blue, green, and yellow"—and propose solutions informed by their linguistic expertise.
International Collaboration, Multilingualism, Cross-Cultural Communication, Content Localization, Education Technology
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Sasha Ban
Senior Content Program Manager
Leading Edtech Company
Barnard College
UCLA MBA
Biology & Related Sciences
Education, Technology
Operations and Project Management
Greek Life Member, Student Athlete
Video Highlights
1. Sasha's bicultural and bilingual background has been invaluable in understanding students from diverse cultural backgrounds, particularly those from collectivist cultures versus the more individualistic US culture.
2. Her language skills and cultural awareness are particularly useful in her current role, working with Khan Academy's international teams to ensure content is translatable and localizable across different cultures.
3. Sasha highlights subtle issues in translation, such as color terminology in multiple-choice questions, which demonstrates her keen eye for detail and cultural nuances in content creation. This shows how language skills can improve a product for a global audience.
Transcript
As someone who identifies as a second-generation American, how has that impacted how you've navigated your career?
Growing up with an immigrant parent in a bicultural and bilingual household has been really useful in a number of ways. It's helped me as an educator when I worked with many different students and families.
It really helped me to understand where a lot of my students were coming from, particularly those from cultural backgrounds different from the United States. I had students who came from countries that are more collectivist and group-oriented, as opposed to the more individualistic culture predominant in the US. Being able to see and navigate those nuances has been helpful.
In my current role, even though I work on our US content team, I work closely with our international team. Khan Academy's courses are translated into over 55 languages, and we have extensive teams in Brazil and India. I meet regularly with our international team to discuss what we need to consider on the US side to make our content translatable and localizable.
Localizable means, for example, if we have a math problem with apples in the US, our India team might localize it and use mangoes. This is because mangoes are a fruit learners there are more likely to be familiar with. Having a bilingual background has been useful because subtle translation issues are often picked up more quickly when you speak another language.
We have issues with multiple-choice questions, for instance. If the answers are a bar graph with colors like red, blue, green, and yellow, this becomes a problem for non-English languages. In most languages other than English, these words are adjectives and require a noun to modify.
Having an understanding of a language that's grammatically different from English has been helpful for quickly identifying and solving many of those issues.