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| A screenshot of UMBC Special Collections blog |
By: Kayla Brooks
After completing an internship placement, it is essential for any intern to reflect on their experience: what did you like most about your internship, and how could it have gone better? What valuable things did you learn or gain along the way that you can use in the future? Did you make the most of your time and achieve the goals you set at the beginning of your contract? Now that my internship in Special Collections has come to an end, I have a lot to reflect upon…
I think what I liked most about my internship in Special Collections (aside from the fact that I always like working there!) was seeing all the different kinds of projects my colleagues were producing for the 50th anniversary project, and being able to contribute to that whether it be through collaborative work or creating my own content. UMBC Special Collections houses a wide variety of interesting materials in our archives, so seeing them get put to use and shared on a broader scale through digital engagement and outreach was a really great project to be able to participate in.
Of course, my most favorite project to work on was my romance comic blog post! Going into the internship, I didn’t have any specific ideas in mind concerning what I wanted to do for self-produced content, so figuring it out along the way just by looking through what was in Special Collections and making it come to life was a highly rewarding experience. What helped the most was that I chose something that I was interested in so that it could be entertaining for me, but also have historical research merit as well. I also really enjoyed the process of making Instagram posts for our #PhotobookFriday series. Being able to pick from subgenres that appealed to me, such as the fashion photography book I used for my second post, and take pictures of these books in the reading room for all of our followers to see was something I looked forward to doing every week.
In completing these projects, I feel as though I developed a lot of invaluable skills and experiences that I will take with me as I continue to pursue public history. First, it was very meaningful to work in a collaborative environment like Special Collections where my goals were supported. To me, an internship should be mutually beneficial, and from the perspective of an intern, provide skills, knowledge, experience, etc. that will help further advance education and career goals. Furthermore, the internship shouldn’t solely be about having another entry of work experience to put on a resume, but fostering positive relationships with peers and mentors in the field that will help you in your future endeavors. This internship helped me develop public-facing writing as well as social media management skills, which I think will be highly useful going forward. In addition to this, I was able to take into consideration very important factors in digital content production and public outreach such as accessibility, which is just one component of the larger mission I feel the public history discipline should be pursuing.
If I had the chance to do the internship over again knowing what I know now, I would definitely go in with clearer goals of what I wanted to do so that I could maximize my time and accomplish tasks more efficiently. Furthermore, I think it would have been great to post content that is more diversely representative of Special Collections materials. Contributing to the #PhotobookFriday series was really fun and I love the pictures I was able to take. But while photo books serve as a flagship feature of UMBC’s Special Collections archive, I think I could have done more to explore different types of materials and make content about them as well aside from my blog post. Overall, I wish I was able to commit more time to the internship in order to fully explore all of the functions of my position that I could have. Nonetheless, I am still satisfied with my work and am grateful for the opportunity that I was given to work in Special Collections again.
