Steve Anderson has always had a passion for food. He was taught to cook by his mother, who is half Burmese. After studying physics in college, he got a summer job helping with a cooking course in Italy.
Source: American English File 3
Is the bold word equivalent with "a summer job which was helping with a ..."?
Although you can say it both ways:
He got a job painting houses.
He got a job, which was painting houses.
the two sentences have somewhat different meanings. It is not as though in the first version the words which was have been omitted.
In the first example, painting houses is a participle clause complement of job. painting houses is integral to job. We might represent the integral relationship visually as jobpaintinghouses or {job {painting houses}}.
In the second example, painting houses is a verbal-noun and it a fact stated about the subject:
He got a job, which [job] was painting houses.
The short answer is Yes, the two are equivalent. Although "which was" doesn't really help the sentence out any. And I, perhaps unreasonably, hate this sentence a lot.
I think I feel so strongly because we don't even know where his job was. Not to mention what function he performed. He could have been "helping the cooking course in Italy" by editing videos from his mother's basement in Chicago.
After studying physics in college he got a summer job in Italy helping with a cooking course.
This is still a fairly poor sentence because he may have "helped" the cooking course by gathering eggs at local farms. But at least we have him on the same continent now. Unfortunately, but directly to my point, we can't really say more because we don't know what he did. If we take some poetic license we might rewrite it thus:
After studying physics in college he traveled to Italy. There he got a job at the University of Rome selecting recipes for a cooking course offered there.
See a very few more words would have massively increased the information conveyed by the sentence.
