Items

• 
  2022-08-02

  HST 580 Professional Experience/Archives course

  The online history MA program in conjunction with the public history program at Arizona State University ran an internship for history graduate students to work on the JOTPTY archive. Internships were held in summer 2020, fall 2020, spring 2021, and spring 2022. Students were asked to submit to the archive and were often given guided assignments. The nature of the submissions varied from contributing to a specific collection to conducting an oral history. In the first internship participants developed collections and began creating calls for submissions and collecting for specific collections. In the Fall 2020 semester, students continued adding to collections and worked more extensively on oral histories. In Spring 2021, more interns experimented with the Omeka exhibits feature and finally in Spring 2022 a large portion of the internship was dedicated to data cleaning and a self-directed project. As part of their 180 hours, students were always encouraged to share their own pandemic stories or respond to varied prompts. Internship Director: Kathleen Kole de Peralta
• 
  12/08/2020

  Lindsey Jo Boehm Oral History, 2020/12/08

  Lindsey Jo Boehm is a full-time student that attends the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where she studies Nursing. Lindsey is a very busy student who balances work and school, and still finds time for spending time with her friends and family. In addition to a heavy school load, Lindsey works as a nurse’s aide in a critical care unit at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as well as being a research assistant for a nursing professor at the University. In this interview, Lindsey illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected her employment, her relationship with her friends and family, her health, and her community. She provides meaningful insight as somebody who interacts with the healthcare field, and explains how the world can better prepare for a future viral outbreak.
• 
  2020-05-10

  Repetition in Quarantine

  The first days to even weeks of the pandemic for me, consisted of a very repetitive pattern: wake up, zoom into classes, work out, nap once or twice, binge watch Netflix or Hulu and repeat. This monotonous lifestyle of the same thing every single day in quarantine, quickly started to wear me down. At first, I, like most people, had assumed it would be like an extended spring break, but as the coronavirus continued to spread, doubt started to creep into my mind, and it began to feel like it would never end. Two major events underlined this feeling for me and made me feel as though I was missing on an important part of my life and my “college experience”. First, I was unable to attend my youngest sister’s graduation, then quickly after I was informed that my internship for the summer was probably not going to be able to begin. These two things back-to-back, sent me into an even bigger funk, where I started thinking about all the things, opportunities, events, etc. both big and small that I was missing out on due to the pandemic. This lasted for several days, where I would do nothing but stay in my room, watch TV shows, and feel bad for myself. Finally, sometime in mid-June, one of my friends suggested to go on a hike while wearing masks. This turned out to be a pivotal moment for me during the pandemic, as it showed me that I could continue to do things that brought me joy even during the pandemic. All of a sudden instead of gloomily sitting around my room, I began to think of things I could do or try with this “new normal” we were all subjected to. I realized how normally I do not get to spend much time with my family due to school and work, so I began to make it more of a priority to spend time with them, even if it was just watching a movie together at night. It also reignited my love of nature and just being outside, something that I had not prioritized since I was a young kid. I started taking hikes with my dogs, exploring new trails, and playing soccer again. Although my life, like pretty much everyone else’, had been completely turned upside down my the coronavirus pandemic, I was able to put a somewhat positive spin on it, by enjoying my time with my family and the chance to get outside.
• 
  2020-05-29

  Working Remote Internship

  Everyday, in theory, I wake up around 7:30am to prepare for my 8am meetings. Most days I wake up 10 minutes before, roll over and turn on my company-issued computer. If my internship were to be in person, I would have to drive 20 minutes to the office building in a different city. I honestly would prefer to attend my internship in person, but I admit online internships have their advantages. For one, no one knows that I am lying down on my bed eating during meetings. I never have to excuse myself to use the restroom. I can grab a snack anytime I want and wear my pajamas. On the other hand, I like dressing up in business casual and making an effort to look good. I was even looking forward to waking up early to commute. I wanted to explore the big beautiful office and meet other interns. So while I do not mind a remote internship, part of me is constantly thinking about what could've been.
• 
  2021-04-25

  Matthew Williams

  This is the end results from my experiences as an intern with the Journal of the Plague Year archive
• 
  2021-04-25

  Padraic Cohen Internship Portfolio

  This is my portfolio for my internship experience with the JOTPY, thank you so much for this; I really enjoyed working with each and every one of you - thank you for everything.
• 
  2021-04-25

  Robin Keagle Internship Portfolio

  For many reasons, The Journal of the Plague Year internship is the culmination of my graduate school experience. Other than my Public History Methodology course, my exposure to this field was quite limited. Now, this internship is prompting me to broaden my scope of professional interest and explore all that archival and preservation work has to offer. It is an exciting prospect that I look forward to pursuing soon. There are so many aspects that I enjoyed during my time with JOTPY. Although the curation experience I gained and the people I met tie at a close second, my favorite experience was identifying silences within the archive. I had no idea that within a year of reading Marisa J. Fuentes’s, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, I would be identifying an Indigenous silence within the JOTPY archive. Creating the collection, Indigenous Point of View, to combat this silence was a unique experience that I will never forget. I gained invaluable experience writing its Call for Submissions and Indigenous POV Press Release while critically thinking how to build the collection. I learned so much about resilience within Indigenous culture throughout North America and look forward to other ways to assist in Indigenous land sovereignty efforts and the demarginalization of this beautiful culture. As for other notable experiences, my time with JOTPY allowed me to practice thinking like a historian while curating, conducting oral histories, and co-creating a digital exhibit. Also, I was able to informally network with JOTPY leads during some of the weekly Town Hall meetings and observe planning sessions on marketing events such as the one-year anniversary of the archive. It was fascinating to participate in these conversations while getting to know JOTPY partners across the country. What an invaluable opportunity. Thank you to Dr. Mark Tebeau, who quickly responded to my email expressing interest in the internship. Also, an enthusiastic thank you to Dr. Kole. Not knowing what to expect when I started with JOTPY, I wondered how much the interns would work together. However, her peer-review assignments and her encouragement for intern collaboration created many opportunities to connect. Her method of facilitation was succinct, fun, and fostered so much collaboration within my cohort. Enduring the COVID-19 pandemic with fellow interns across North America made these first four months of 2021 so much more bearable. We shared a moment in history in a way that the majority of the world never will. I leave this unique internship with valuable new archival skills that I am confident will serve me well. I move forward with more historical tools in my toolbelt, new professional connections, and new friends. A great way to conclude indeed.
• 
  2021-04-25

  Robert Baker-Nicholas Portfolio

  The internship experience has been one that has taught me many new and different skills that I did not have before or were very low on my abilities prior to this experience. Before I started this internship I had no experience in the field of public history or curation. I gained skills like learning how to preserve various sources for future posterity. I learned the process of properly using a system like Omeka, securing digital sources for the future, working on collections, oral histories, and more. The oral history part of my internship gave me skills that I can bring into my current role as a Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator by having some of our teachers encourage our students to conduct oral histories of our local town members in order to meet their standards in our state. My school uses the hands-on teaching method in order to bring the curriculum alive and this could be one way to implement and bring history alive. I also sharpened my skills of teamwork, collaboration, and virtual zooming in order to meet a project end goal. One thing this experience has taught me is that the pandemic has caused technology and collaboration to be taken to a next level and that I feel it will continue to grow and change in the future. This experience will also be memorable due to the fact that the actual documentation of the history is occurring while the events are happening not after the fact which is a unique experience.
• 
  2021-05-22

  Ruby Lee Bell JOTPY Portfolio

  The JOTPY archives rapidly developed while the Covid-19 pandemic was still new for all of us. I was one of the original interns who joined HST580 as the class, and the archives were being developed. Although, I am not interested in pursuing public history as a career, I was hoping to learn a little bit about public history so I could share what I learned with my own students. Through the internship I gained experience in curating, data collection, addressing silences, community outreach, ethics, and producing oral histories. One of my passions during the internship has been documenting social justice issues in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic locked us all away inside and pulled the day-to-day agenda away. It became unavoidable during the pandemic but to pay attention to the realities in the States, even those realities some of us were able to comfortably ignore before. For many, social justice issues in America surpassed the urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic. I personally felt an urgency to record the pluralities of the pandemic and the fight for equality in the United States within the archive. The Social Justice collection within the archive grew with submissions from all backgrounds and walks of life. They shed light on both the pandemic and social justice, and how it affected them. I also worked with a team to create the Social Justice Voices in North America exhibition. The collection was designed to amplify the voices of those who fought for social justice during the pandemic. This experience has taught me many skills that I am able to bring my students as an educator. I now understand the large-scale collaborative effort that a rapid response archive requires. I can explain to my students the ethics of information collection, what silences are, and how public historians of today work hard to bridge the gaps in archival accessibility, and this was not always so. This experience has been more fulfilling than I originally expected. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to make close connections with other interns. I have learned so much from them. I hope to stay in contact with them.
• 2021-02-06

  Burnt Out Before Beginning

  January 2020 was going to be my year. I had gotten an internship in Pittsburgh, PA that only selected 200 kids out of the thousands of applicants. Not only did I get the internship, but I got it on the unit I wanted to be on, the Emergency Department. March of 2020 comes along. The pandemic has now hit the United States, and everyone panics. May of 2020 comes along. Still in quarantine and in lockdown. I had been out of my job for the past 2 months and was about to begin my internship. Although I was excited to get back to work, I never imagined that it would be as brutal as it was. Every morning at 6:30 am we would get screened at the door. Masks were given out, temperatures were taken, and the three health screening questions were asked. At first, no one came to the hospital. Everyone was still scared and didn’t want to come to the place that held confirmed COVID-19 positive patients. This lasted about a week. Then everyone began coming. Before we knew it we had more patients than staff and we didn’t have enough beds for everyone coming in. Patients would come in with a broken foot and next thing you knew they were COVID positive. Did we wear our mask properly around them? Did they cough on us? Did we maintain 6 feet apart? These were all the questions rambling through our heads once we had learned that a patient was positive after taking care of them all day under standard precautions. We didn’t have enough N-95 masks for everyone to wear, so you had one and that’s what you used all the time. The amount of PPE (personal protective equipment) was far less than we needed. The hospitals tried their best to get them, but sometimes we had to make do without it. At the time, not everyone could get swabbed. We didn’t have enough it’s for everyone so only those that had 3 major symptoms (fever, sore throat, body aches). This was before we knew the asymptomatic patients were so high in number. Every day we wore our masks for 13 plus hours. Every day we wore gloves and gowns for 13 plus hours. Every day we put our lives at risk to save everyone else for 13 plus hours. This is only a snippet of what healthcare members saw throughout this pandemic and are still seeing today. Within 4 months, I was burnt out from the pandemic. I graduate in May and I fear to see what the hospitals will be like then. In better words: wear your masks, get vaccinated if possible, and follow the guidelines. It may not harm some of you personally, but it is hurting your healthcare professionals every day that this pandemic lingers.
• 
  2020-03-23

  Working an Internship During a Pandemic

  I do not think anyone could have imagined that we would find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic only three months into the year 2020. But everyone remembers where they were when they found out the world was turned upside down. For me, it was only two months into my first co-op experience. I was working at a construction management company just outside of Boston, MA. I was living in on-campus housing and was the only one in my suite there at the time because my roommates were home on Spring Break. I knew something was up when they extended the break and later told everyone that they had to move out. Panicked and not wanting to commute an hour and a half from my home in New Hampshire to my co-op, I applied to my school to allow me to stay. I was approved and was able to live in my six-person suite by myself. Then, less than a week later, I was told I needed to move out regardless of applying to stay because the coronavirus was spreading even more. I was also told I needed to be out of the dorms in less than 48 hours. My employer was great about it though, and very understanding. The next day, the Mayor of Boston shut down construction in the city and my co-workers began to start working from home. Soon, I was told I needed to work from home too. I had gone from sitting in on meetings to logging on. I saw some of my co-workers get furloughed while I was still working because they could pay me less. While I was losing the hands-on aspect and in-person contact experience that I was previously getting, I was now learning how to communicate with people in a different way, which included a lot of emails. Overall, while it was not the ideal first co-op experience, I still was able to learn a lot and gained invaluable experience all while living through a global pandemic.
• 
  2020-11-22

  Angelica S Ramos Portfolio

  Before I started this internship, I was hoping for some direction in my career. I have been out of the workforce for a very long time and was hoping for guidance. I had previous knowledge of public history thanks to a course I had taken early on in this program. It was this same course that pushed me towards pursuing a career in public history. I had always known what I wanted to do; I just didn’t know what it was called. I have acquired so many new skills through this internship experience. Many of these are transferable into my future career. The biggest ones being working with a team asynchronously, creating metadata, and utilizing the best practices for curating and archiving. I also learned how to build a collection, how to utilize my marketing skills and how to run a social media campaign. Moving forward I would love to continue to curate and work on the archive. When thinking about what pushed me out of my comfort zone it is really hard to pinpoint just one aspect. Personally, I am an introvert, this internship pushed me out of my comfort zone socially. I toughly enjoyed talking about ethical issues and best practices with my classmates. Starting this course was overwhelming and the feeling of jumping into the unknown was uncomfortable. Looking back now I have no regrets about choosing to take this course because I have learned so much. The biggest lesson I learned about myself is that I have found what I love to do. I started my historical journey three years ago when I went back to school. I decided on a history degree because I love history but had no idea what I wanted to do with my degree other than I didn’t want to teach. This experience has solidified my desires to go into public history. Although I learned a lot throughout this internship, the connections I have made are more valuable. Through this internship I have met many like-minded people who have already become an important part of my educational journey. I look forward to the next chapter in my life and hoping that leads me to a career in archiving and curating.
• 
  10/17/2022

  Sachiko Mortia-Mulaney Oral History, 2020/10/17

  This is an Oral History interview with University of Cincinnati student Sachiko Morita-Mullaney. Sachiko discusses her experience as a student at the University of Cincinnati. She brings up her identity as a Japanese-American woman and how that has affected her personally during the pandemic due to anti-Asian racism. She also talks about her small online business, and the different ways her and her family’s employment have been affected by Covid-19. Sachiko, a Political Science major at the University of Cincinnati, is very informed about the government’s response to Covid-19. She shares her opinions about healthcare in the United States and how racism and classism have affected the United States’ response to the coronavirus. Finally, we talked about the future and the quality of the US response to the coronavirus.
• 
  10/05/2020

  Bailey DeMoss Oral History, 2020/10/05

  The content of the Oral History project is to record peoples experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. What that does is it helps researchers and others understand different peoples experiences other than their own. This helps them come up with information and statistics to go along with their research of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• 2020-10-03

  COVID-19: Investigating My Positive Aspect

  At a time in history where there were only a few cases of COVID-19 in the world, I, a college student, was applying to be a mentor for a math-science Honors program and my university. I was once a participant of this program, and to give back to it and help high school students navigate this program and their futures would have meant the absolute world to me. I was completing the second round of the hiring process when it was announced that the remaining of the spring 2020 semester would be held online. It was from this point on that I knew this pandemic was going to change my future plans. At the time, however, I did not see it as a "big deal" because in my mind I was thinking that once this virus is controlled and everything is relaxed, things would go back to normal. Obviously, that was not the case. Shortly after, the university required everyone that was able to go home to do so. Approximately a week after that it was announced that the summer program I was planning on working for over the summer would have to be cancelled. Within the span of a month the routine that I grew accustomed to and the plans I had were completely altered, almost like a punch in the gut. That is not where the story ends, though. I am studying to be a civil engineer, and my uncle is a civil engineer who owns his own business in my hometown and is self-employed. So, I was given the opportunity to intern at his business. I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Within the two months that I interned there, I gained a great deal of knowledge and experience that I would not have otherwise acquired. I learned nearly every aspect of the job, from programming materials, on-site job inspections, to the steps required by government officials and engineers alike to even begin a job. Considering I just completed my freshman year, I went into the internship knowing practically nothing about real engineering work, as I had only taken the basic required classes. Two months later, however, I can confidently say that I learned more then than I would have learned sitting at home all day. It also gave me a great opportunity to see whether or not civil engineering is the career path that I want to go down, which I can confidently say now that it is. The opportunity to have the experience over the summer is what I would consider to be a positive outcome arising from quarantine and having the summer program at the university cancelled.
• 
  2020-09-29

  How COVID Affected My Summer

  This story is my experience with COVID and what I think the future holds from this learning experience.
• 
  09/19/2020

  Katarzyna Kumor Oral History, 2020/09/19

  This interview was conducted and uploaded for the purposed of a class at Northeastern University centered around the study of pandemics. This interview goes a bit into the experiences of a college student during their last semester before graduation. It is focused largely on interning before graduation and transitioning from student to working adult.
• 
  09/19/2020

  Emma Matheson Oral History, 2020/09/19

  This is an interview with a college freshman and her experience with the pandemic. This mainly covers how the year changed during the 2nd semester of high school, and the resulting summer.
• 
  2020-08-27

  Lawson Miller Internship Portfolio

  I decided to embark on this internship despite no previous experience in public history, and it has afforded me the opportunity to learn many things about the practice of public history and historical collection more broadly. Having worked on the internship in tandem with a fellowship role on the same project had challenged and pushed me in ways I hadn’t imagined. Having begun the project as a volunteer, a fellow, and then an intern placed me at the apex of an entirely new experience, and is part of my drive to challenge myself, to learn, to be part of something larger than myself, and to grow. In my first semester of graduate school, I became deeply immersed and personally invested in a project that had become bigger than I may have initially anticipated. This project has taught me, among other things: leadership, patience, collaboration, how to be adapt quickly, as well as the concept of shared authority. The skills and growth I have received over this journey has been invaluable. In addition to learning important skills and practices relating to history, the internship has given me practical experience in being a leader among my peers, communicating effectively through press releases and social media, and developing effective standardized practices. These skills will be invaluable in whatever I pursue, as well as in my life more broadly. Getting lost in the work of the internship regarding the historical curation of the pandemic, has ironically distracted me from the pandemic itself to an extent, in my personal life. I have paused many times during the course of this internship to reflect on the significance of our work and the significance of this moment in history. The friends and professional relationships I have created through this experience will follow me throughout my life and academic career.
• 
  2020-08-26

  JOTPY ASU Intern Meeting August 26, 2020

  Why is it so hard for me to say goodbye to this group of interns? I’ve taught face-to-face classes, I’ve taught online, and I’ve never had this reaction at the end of a class. HST580: Professional Experience is done. Normally this is the point where I turn in grades and post a meme or giphy about grading. But I didn’t do that, because I don’t want to want to look at their portfolios and I don’t want to read their last journal entries. When I do that, it’s really over. The oh so experimental 15 week internship completed remotely and asynchronously proved to be one of the most fulfilling experiences of my higher ed teaching career. Today, as the dust began to settle after their last meeting, I asked myself. What is the big deal? Why did you cry (again) when saying goodbye to this group of students on Zoom? I think there are a lot of factors at play. One is that we all took a crash course on rapid response archives together. I had barely a hair and sometimes no more expertise than the interns, and their critical analysis of curation, best practices, and ethics helped the team solve problems in real time. Second, although I love teaching online, like many I’ve felt very isolated with the shelter in place rules. Even though I have a wonderful family and a less than wonderful dog, I looked forward to our weekly meetings quite earnestly. It felt like my one or two moments of the week that I got to connect with people and talk about really interesting things, even if sometimes I was just venting. We all got to vent. We vented about the pandemic’s effect on our mental health, the almost overwhelming feeling some days that we just can’t stand it anymore, and the frustration that it feels like things aren’t getting better and normal is so ephemeral we fear we might never know it again. Third is that the interns were true to themselves and authentic. No two were exactly the same, but they were willing to push themselves and evolve with a constantly moving target. What more can one ask for than to work with genuine people, who took on a huge project and found the path of collaboration instead of competition. Today’s meeting culminated in a recorded conversation with a representative from CBS. Potentially, some of the conversation could wind up the program “60 Minutes.” The conversation was so rich, diverse, and truly heartwarming that the entire meeting needs to be a part of the archive. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything, and I feel so lucky to have worked with such an incredible team.
• 
  2020-08-24

  Golden Opportunity

  I created this sweet (as in cool) poster to promote the JOTPY Internship and recruit more participants for the fall semester. I love the imagery of hand sanitizer as liquid gold. The fact that it a public mural makes it even more compelling. I started off with 9 students enrolled in the fall internship. This internship is open to ASU history graduate students. Yet, slowly that number dropped down to four. I’m not sure why. I don’t think that there’s a better opportunity out there right now. Nowhere else can you complete a remote internship on the scale of the COVID-19 archive. This archive is magnanimous, it’s important now, but it will be remembered as a watershed moment in public history projects. I do recognize that people are busy, and the fact that the internship goes beyond the normal 7.5 week session is an extra piece to juggle, but in my mind anyone who wants to do public history or gain a serious skill set needs to be part of this project. I hope I can convince more people to join.
• 
  2020-08-22

  Stephanie Berry Internship Portfolio

  Before starting this internship, I had little to no knowledge of working behind the scenes in public history. My focus is on public history, but I am still learning the ins and outs. I learned many valuable lessons on not only public history but also working with the public in an academic field. For me, some of the most useful parts of the internship were the oral histories and the ethics of the archives. I learned about the importance of transcripts and how much work goes into recording oral history. When it comes to ethics, I am still learning, but I am grateful to have experienced how JOTPY protects people's privacy and sensitive information. I am now aware of when and how to redact sensitive information and the best practices for redacting in an archival setting. I am more aware of the best file types to use when preserving digital items. I am eager to learn more about the digital side of public history from Omeka to apps. I chose to preserve the impact of the pandemic on the food industry, food habits, and body image because of my tie to the industry, my interest in food history and fat studies. It has been a difficult topic to work on, but the experience I gained working on the Foodways collection has been priceless. In hindsight, I wish I had chosen a more relatable collection because I often felt like I was alone in left field. Other interns were able to share and exchange items, that did not happen with my collection as much as others. Besides a couple of interns, I did not get the chance to network with others. Food is a relatable subject, but the industry is not. I found areas that I need to develop, including my networking skills and being confident in what I bring to the academic table. I gained a lot of confidence in my abilities through this internship, and I am grateful for the areas; it helped me see where I have room to grow. As a student with learning disabilities from a non-academic background, I was the fish out of the water, but so many of my skills did translate. The internship also gave me the push I needed to leave my comfort zone and view myself outside of the industry I've been working in for decades. If I could keep working on this archive, I would in a heartbeat, I am grateful for all that I have learned this summer.
• 
  2020-08-23

  Alex Hinely Internship Portfolio

  As a second-year graduate student in the History MA program at Arizona State University, I found myself enrolling in the HST 580: Professional Experience course after viewing an online announcement outlining the unique experience of a remote internship. With prior experience as a digital archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institute, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection, in addition to years spent as an undergraduate research assistant at the UCLA Center for Korean Studies digitizing reels of microfilm, I initially believed this internship to be hours of busywork without much substance. I was quickly proven wrong, however. Unlike the previous archives mentioned, A Journal of the Plague Year is a living and breathing archive, recording stories as they occur. This constant fluctuation resulting from live submissions created a dynamic, and sometimes turbulent, workspace that required interns to possess flexibility, problem-solving, and innovation skills. Far from my initial understanding of the internship, the archive provided curatorial interns with a wide-ranging set of skills applicable in any professional environment. Using Omeka-S, Otter.ai, and Slack, interns learned to enhance accessibility to historical documents by curating and transcribing crowdsourced items into a searchable resource. Curatorial interns carefully handled thousands of photographs, articles, and recordings, while assisting with branding, legal compliance, and writing for diverse platforms. Through archival collaborations with international universities and institutions, interns were able to advance their communication skills to convey necessary, time-sensitive, and fluctuating information concerning the live curation of items. This interactive and innovative internship challenged my understanding of public history and pushed me to appreciate the archival process in a new light. As calls for submissions urged individuals to share their everyday experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, I recognized the importance of documenting daily happenings and confronting historical silences. As a result, A Journal of the Plague Year reignited my determination to support rural K-12 students and ensure that their stories are documented alongside their urban and suburban counterparts. While I have no immediate plans to become a public historian, I have learned an innumerable amount of skills that will surely advance my career in the educational sector.
• 
  2020-08-19

  Portfolio of an intern of the Journal of a plague year archive

  Prior to interning the JOTPY internship I thought we would be doing a lot of submissions for the archive to build it and maybe online work to raise awareness of the archive. I had no real knowledge of public history and was going in not expecting it to be such an important part of the archive. Throughout the internship I developed many skills such as curating, how to write a blog, press release and mission statement, and how to build an individual archive collection. I realized my colloquial writing was weak during the internship since many of the projects involved reaching out directly to the general public and speaking plainly. I was once quite adept at this but being an undergrad and now a graduate student these skills had become quite rusty as I endeavored to perfect my academic writing. I had to learn to work as a team in the internship and also reach out to regular non academics for submissions and these socially based experiences were uncomfortable for me since I am more of an introvert. However, throughout the internship I came to really value the camaraderie and community the interns built together. Before the internship I shied away from group projects as a necessary evil to be avoided at all costs however the internship showed me how much fun working with others could be and to value a great team. The internship also allowed me to network with other people including fellow interns, teachers and archive associates. The internship gave me real world experience of my historical skills introduced me to many new skills set that could pertain to future employment. Overall, it was a great experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world.
• 
  2020-04-29

  Graduating College in a Pandemic

  Landing a full-time job before graduating from college is a daunting task for every student. Now that Covid-19 has spread all over the country and social distancing has gone into full effect, it is much that harder to land a job. Before the pandemic hit, the job market was at its best it has ever been; there were more jobs than people looking. However, from one month to another that all changed. I was active in clubs and everything and anything that would make my resume stand out. I also had 3 internships in my respective major throughout the 4 years of college. During my last internship, which was during the 2019 Fall semester, I got offered a full-time job starting 2 weeks after graduation. However, the offer got rescinded a couple weeks into March. Given the circumstances, I knew that it was going to be hard to find a job. I started tracking all of the jobs I got rejected from and all in all it was 26 jobs. Most of the companies rejection letters started the same way, “Due to Covid-19…”. It would have been easy to give up applying to jobs and wait for the pandemic to die down, whenever that was. I told myself that if the next company I applied for rejected me I would stop applying. Luckily, this time I got an offer. This comes to show how the pandemic has affected every college student around the country, regardless of experience. #REL101
• 
  03/31/2020

  How My Internship Was Affected

  During my Spring 2020 semester at Arizona State University, I was able to become an intern at the Tempe History Museum which is located at 809 E Southern Ave, Tempe, AZ 85282. Due to the pandemic I have been unable to attend the museum which put me in jeopardy of earning credit for it. This added more stress than I needed. For me to get the credit I had to have 135 credits by the end and I was sitting at 60 credits. MY thoughts went into downward spiral . All the 'what ifs' started running through my head. I thought that if I do not get my credit I could not graduate on time, if I can't graduate on time it could prevent me from being able to get a job, without a job I would have no money, with no money I could not pay the bill. It just kept getting worse and worse as I started to think about it. I emailed my advisor and she told me to try and find a remote project. Lucky enough we were doing this project that this journal is located on. I was looking forward to being able to gain experience that would help with me a future career and because of this pandemic that has all been put on hold. I was able to attend the internship before the pandemic and it was the highlight of me my week. I am actually doing something with my life that help better the future. Now that I am not doing that I am kinda losing my mind. We as humans are very routine based creatures and for that routine to be interrupted we tend to freak out. Well for me anyway. I feel like people are not taking this pandemic seriously. They are just going about their normal days as if nothing is going on. Yesterday March 30, 2020, our Governor Doug Ducey declared a stay at home order. This being said all non-essential places would be shut down until at least April 30,2020. Having the stay at home order is really going to make me able to go to the movies, go out to eat, go to museums but especially being able to hang out with friends. Being a non-essential business has really made me mad that I am not able to learn from people that I enjoy being with. I enjoy going to the museum and now that it is taken away for a short period of time I am not gaining any experiences in the museum. We do not know how long this pandemic will last. We are hoping it will end soon. We are hoping that this will all be over by August 2020.
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  2020-03-30

  JFK Library Suspends Internships

  This email documents a large museum foundation's decision to suspend its paid internships indefinitely, undoubtedly in response to coronavirus affecting business. #HIST5214