The "End" Madelyn Pollack #3

I never dreamed that I would spend time working at NASA, but I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn about so many career opportunities, in and out of my field. I have gained a newfound appreciation for the (many!) things that I don’t understand, and I feel that in working at such a place, I am more well-rounded and prepared for the world after college and graduate school. Even when that preparation meant navigating angry Twitter replies about my usage of the metric or imperial systems (I got both, at separate times), I was able to learn from my efforts and move forward productively and reflectively.

One of the most important life lessons I learned over the months I’ve spent as a NASA History intern was that balance and time management are everything. Over the summer, I was spending 40-hour work weeks at the desk in my bedroom at home. During the fall semester, I was spending fewer hours exclusively on internship work, but I was also working as a full-time student. In order to stay on top of all the things I needed to do, it was important for me to take breaks and be aware of all of my deadlines in advance.

As my internship comes to an end, I am looking forward to applying my experience in future internship and job opportunities. Although I will not be continuing this internship for another semester, I intend to continue taking advantage of as many opportunities as I can, with as wide a range as I might possibly apply myself to. My final advice is this: don’t limit yourself to only what you know you can do. Take a leap of faith, even if it means that you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment. The more you can learn outside your comfort zone, the more you grow and can take with you for future endeavors.

"To enjoy full access to this blog post CLICK HERE to SUBSCRIBE!" -- Hitting the Paywall

Let’s begin with a [not so] fun fact. Did you know that the Washington Post doesn’t give free subscriptions to those who work for their Made By History section? Weird, right? This unfortunate system also extends to MBH interns. So before jumping in to my project I had to subscribe to the Washington Post. A small, yet annoying hurdle. 

After paying for a year-long subscription (which I use every day and will probably continue to pay for beyond this year) I got to work creating my database of MBH pieces. Using my expert tech skills, I opened up a Google Spreadsheet and got to work. The process was tedious. For more than a week I spent my time copying and pasting each piece’s title and subtitle, the name of each author, and the date of publication in the hope of being able to search for relevant keywords within the collected data. Then all I had to do was categorize each piece into one of the selected topics (American Revolution, World War I, Cold War, etc.). While this process worked in theory, it was difficult to get results due to the nature of headlines in news publications. While a published article in a historical journal may have a title that could put Hayden White to sleep, titles of MBH pieces are often flashy and leave you wanting more. They pull you into the work with a ‘less-is-more’ attitude that forces you to stop scrolling and click on that piece. While this style hindered my process it taught me a valuable lesson in the difference between writing for a scholarly audience and writing for a public audience. Luckily, I had an alternative method of categorizing these pieces. 

MBH is partnered with bunkhistory.org, an online collection of writing on American history. The staff at Bunk work meticulously to find historical writing on the United States and tag each piece in order to help those interested in American history find what they’re looking for. While I was able to find many relevant pieces using my Paleolithic method, I wouldn’t have been able to finish this project on time without the help and support of those at Bunk. 

After weeks of searching I had a small collection of MBH pieces within each selected topic. Now we needed to figure out what this project would look like in its final form, and how we would get this into classrooms around the country. While the Washington Post has web developers on staff, it was not clear that they would spend time creating a page dedicated to this project. In order to avoid the corporate bureaucracy, the team decided to host this project on Bunk using their collection tool that allows users to group works into a larger theme. The decision was also made to focus on only one of the suggested topics in order to have a finished product that could serve as a model for all subsequent topics. Given its presence in current news cycles, and the availability of pieces focused on the topic, Civil War Memory was chosen as the first topic to perfect. 

All of the work and decisions that went into creating this project up to this point were time consuming, but relatively simple. Everything was within our control, or could be easily maneuvered around. But here, near the end of this process, we realized that the biggest challenge remained back at the beginning: the entire library of MBH pieces lay behind a paywall. With the current state of local political affairs - where school boards are banning books they don’t agree with - it is likely that a subscription to the Washington Post may be too much of a hurdle for schools where these pieces are needed most. The tragic irony of this project - based on the idea of helping educators and students gain access to ideas regarding our shared past and how they shape our current affairs - lies within the current constraints of the newspaper industry, and the continued fight for truth. 

The team at MBH continues to deal with this issue. In the meantime, other interns will continue to create more topic collections in order to have them available for those who do have the means to subscribe to the Washington Post. Hopefully the Post will realize the importance of this project and find a way to allow educators to access these collections for free. 

In my next post I will discuss my work editing with Dr. Brownell, and share some overall thoughts on my internship experience. 

Navigating Challenges and Bureaucracy within the Criminal Justice System

 

My work at Baltimore Witness as an intern has been immensely rewarding thus far. However, such an interesting and thought-provoking internship is not devoid of frustrations and challenges. For the past month at the Baltimore Witness non-profit, we have had to sift through and report retrospectively on an absolutely massive backlog of previously uncovered cases in the circuit court system of Baltimore City. 

This hurdle, which our very small reporting and editing team is trying to tackle, has taught me a lot about how to navigate within a larger bureaucracy to get vital information to inform our readers in our articles. It also brought to light just how many cases, from jury trials to sentencing hearings, go completely unreported if journalists and editors don’t take the initiative to investigate missing leads and discrepancies in the court system themselves. 

The past few weeks have been difficult to balance, as the average day consists of three reporters- including myself- trying to cover and produce articles on around 15 to 20 hearings and trials. While it has presented new levels of stress, jumping from courthouse to courthouse trying to play catch-up, receiving misinformation from a disorganized and understaffed circuit court system, dealing with postponements and delays for trials, and finding the right words to articulate complicated legal jargon, and so on, knowing that Baltimore Witness, though small, is the only publication covering these smaller cases incentivizes me to push through these many challenges. 

I have been provided super helpful insight, advice, and support from my boss, who serves as senior-editor and a reporter herself, who reminds me how to convey a story properly, develop strong leads, follow-up on missing pieces, and balance self-care with school and reporting work. 

As I’m nearing the end of my internship and preparing for the end of the semester, I’m working to find a work, school, and life balance, while I develop my reporting skills and learning more multidisciplinary skills as a history major.  

The past few weeks have entailed new experiences, such as speaking with families of defendants and victims, identifying loopholes to help navigate flaws within the criminal assignment office, and learning which cases to prioritize based on limited-info given to members of the press by the criminal assignment office. 

As I’m nearing the end of my internship and preparing for the end of the semester, I’m working to find a work, school, and life balance, while I develop my reporting skills and learning more multidisciplinary skills as a history major.  

If not STEM, then what? Madelyn Pollack #2

 At the beginning of my NASA internship, there was undoubtedly a feeling of imposter syndrome. If I was going to be at a place defined by its science, how would I find my place without taking any higher math than precalculus? Well, (*spoiler alert*), not everyone who works at NASA has a background in STEM.

When faced with the task of research on a topic of my choice within an enormous field I admittedly knew little about, I was again intimidated. This is where my mentor came in and freed me from my lack of faith in myself and showed me how I could be successful working in the History Office. I had no need to understand in depth the science behind the topic I chose, only enough to be able to talk about it.

In the end, I chose to research orbital debris. Once I established a working knowledge, I used my research skills and my historical brain dived in! The research question I worked from was: “Have major orbital debris events had an impact on public opinion of spaceflight in the U.S.?” To find out, I looked for public opinion polls that might give me an indication of the sentiments surrounding events like Skylab’s plunging return to Earth in 1979 and the Iridium-Cosmos collision in-orbit in 2009. I also looked for newspaper articles that discussed these occurrences and others; I wanted to see what people were actually saying. Were they condemning spaceflight, urging the end of the space program? Were they barreling on, claiming that the events I researched were but small prices to pay in exchange for the answers to what’s out there?

I was shocked to find that in the limited sources I got to look at, not a single person called for the complete stop of space exploration, despite the fact that orbital debris is created each time something launches. I saw many calls to action from people looking to mitigate the problems presented by floating space trash or even proposals to fetch the most dangerous items. While my research didn’t conclude with a research paper, I gained a lot of valuable insight not only into space, research, and debris, but also into the pioneering human spirit that continues seeking answers in space.

I did, however, get the opportunity to present my ongoing research at the Maryland Space Grant’s Student Research Symposium. As the only humanities student in a room of actual rocket scientists, I was nervous, but ended up learning a lot from the other student researchers. Below, you can see a photo of me standing with my poster at the symposium. Note the title: I was extremely proud of that!

For my last post, I’ll focus on major takeaways and reflections from my time at NASA.

Writing [Editing] is Rewriting - Nolan Varee Blog Post 1

It never occurred to me that I enjoyed writing. Writing was something that I did the night before a paper was due, not a skill to practice and improve. It wasn’t until my second semester of graduate studies at UMBC, after making revisions to numerous drafts of various papers, that I finally came to understand that - as Dr. Chapin loves to say - writing is rewriting. It became a game to me, a challenge to improve my work every time I came back to it. Instead of throwing words on the paper and hitting print I began pushing myself to make every sentence clear and concise. 

My new interest in writing and editing pushed me to think about how I could include these skills in my future career. After discussing the possibilities with a number of professors in the history department, I was introduced to Dr. Kathryn Cramer Brownell, a Professor of history at Purdue University, and Co-Editor of the Made By History section of the Washington Post. 

Made By History serves as a venue for historians and other scholars to comment on current events while placing them in historical context. Each week, the team at MBH recruits, edits, and publishes eleven pieces online. I began my internship with MBH in order to gain an understanding of the work of an editor for a publication. I would shadow Dr. Brownell in her editing process in order to see if this was a career I would like to pursue. 

However, before I could jump into editing, I was given a project that would allow me to continue to improve my research and writing skills. Using typical periods studied in a survey US history course (American Revolution, Civil War, WWI, etc.) I was tasked with organizing existing MBH pieces into these various categories in order to promote the use of these pieces in secondary and undergraduate classes. Unfortunately, MBH did not have a searchable database of their published pieces, forcing me to first create a rough database in order to begin searching for keywords in the titles of the over 2,000 existing pieces. When this process was all said and done, I would then bring the pieces together into one finished product and write descriptions of the pieces and how they fit into the larger theme. 

I knew that this was going to be a big project that would take most of the summer. But I also knew that completing this project successfully would allow me to understand how MBH pieces are written, which would be useful when it came time to make edits of my own. So I set out to find the representative pieces, reading numerous pieces per day, tagging and annotating as I went. 

In my next post I will describe some of the issues that came up in my search, as well as the problems we had in trying to figure out how this project would be promoted. I’ll also describe my experience working with Dr. Brownell and the MBH editing process.