As I am now further into my internship experience, having finished a first draft of my project and worked about fifty hours in total, it is largely following along to my early expectations. In general, it is not surprising to me that my favorite part of the experience is working with primary sources and researching historical content. Searching through archived sources, digitized court documents, and other materials is certainly part of why I am pursuing education in History. Furthermore, using these sources to write digital content is another enjoyable aspect that I was hoping to get out of this experience. It is one thing to learn history for my own sake, but it is another to have an opportunity to share history with an audience to help them learn. As I have explained prior in this program, I want to work in a field where I can constantly help others engage in historical content and help encourage similar loves for learning as my own. Thankfully, this internship is providing me an enjoyable foundation to do that work. In the next few weeks, I will be pivoting more towards the digital element of the project, where I will be creating the electronic exhibit itself. I estimate that this will be a less enjoyable aspect of the process than the research and writing portion, but I plan on trying my best while keeping in mind how much of an important learning experience it is.

Thinking about these experiences thus far, I want to try to make use of this program’s opportunity as much as I can during this next year. The internship I am working on is giving me a valuable framework for how history can be used in various occupations and other educational circumstances. While I am greatly enjoying this project, it is mainly building on skills that I already know. Therefore, I want to see how I can best network and increase my collaborative and teamwork experience. In the meantime, I intend to see how effectively I can perform in an individual-scale project like this one so that I have a basis for expanding my experience in the next internship. Regarding my own work style preferences, it has not been too difficult to fit this internship in with graduate school and my other work. I have found it very effective to devote between three to five hours on specific days, where I can fully focus on this internship work in set periods. In fact, these intervals have provided a nice respite from other work because I can consistently enjoy interacting with the content. Otherwise, as I explained above, this internship is largely building on my existing skills, so I will need to see if I have to adjust my usual style in the coming weeks.