Veterans History Project Internship Spring '26

Welcome Back Everyone! This week for our meetings professionalizing history topic we had a guest speaker. Jessica Robkin gave us her time to talk about the public history field and all the jobs it encompasses and what these jobs look for when hiring. Her advice to us was her emphasis on how important it is to keep a desktop version of a cv and resume and update it often. She also went over her education and how important it was for her to have had experience with her degree versus just leaving college with her degree and no formal skills. Her big recommendations are to go out there with our time and to get your hands on everything with experience. She also gave some of her time to talk about what pay is like and was very candid about what employers were paying despite degrees and experience. Aside from this wonderful experience with Jessica Robkin, This week I had a chance to do a mid term one-on-one with one of my team members. Being in a leadership position will never not be difficul...

 Welcome Back Everybody!  As per the title suggests this week we had our field trip to the Orlando Regional History Center. We had a chance to talk to Jeremy Hileman the Assistant Curator and Cheyenne Stastyshyn the Public Programming Coordinator. We spoke with them about the varying functions of the museum what their day to day tasks look like and, even a deeper dive into the specifics of their job. I had no clue that part of curator duties was to also do oral history interviews. The Veterans History Project's main goal is to preserve the stories and oral histories of veterans. It was incredibly interesting to know that there is also a job function in museums that deals with this specific responsibility. I figured taking oral histories would be part of a marketing or promotional job function. The education team also surprised me with everything that they do. It's more than just field trip guides and learning opportunities being created for children. They also plan programs fo...

 Welcome Back Everyone! Welcome to week 5, this week was quite the quick and easy one. Most of our other peers for our meeting were away for their own project work leaving the rest of us to do our virtual meeting for the week. I am reminded in these time of the safe, inclusive, and generally kind environment I was welcomed into. Sometimes the slower meetings are chances for everyone to mingle and really get to know each person a little better. After discussing what everyone has been up to and voicing my concerns for my team, we went on to do another training about the ethics of interviews. And why it is important when showing up for a community to have an ethical and trustworthy approach. The meeting was very quick and allowed us all to have a good time after and just talk amongst ourselves. Sometimes having fun i just a important as the hard work we put forward. I also took Wednesday and Thursday to getting the work for VHP going, I finished my first tasks and was able to get some...

 Welcome back!  This week we took a trip to the special collections and archive at UCF’s library and met with the staff there to talk about what all their work entails and some of the education backgrounds of those who work there. David Benjamin who is the head of the archives at UCF explained how they process their documents and why they do it that way. We also got to have a Q &A portion with the team to ask anything we were interested about. I decided to ask about the job hiring process, specifically how much of getting the job is having experience versus having the educational background. It seemed to me based on his answer that in most all cases most archives would rather have someone with intimate knowledge on what they were doing and how they could apply their skills to any scenario, instead of someone who may have a masters degree but has no internship or job experience at all. Getting a job is hard, but it's especially hard when the history job market is not high i...