Firstly I would like to thank Lindsey Baker the Director of Patapsco Heritage Greenway who gave me the opportunity to work on these projects and Dr. Meringolo of the History Department of UMBC for setting me up with this opportunity. I cant thank either of you enough.
First I'm going to start by talking about the project that I did for my last month of my internship. Then I will talk about the project overall and what I thought about it.
The project for the last month of my internship was to create an inventory of all of the environmental, cultural, and historical signage in the Patapsco Valley Heritage area. I was to find all signage that I considered significant enough to be included in the inventory. There wasn't a real road-map or criteria for the signage itself, so I created one throughout the process. Choosing what to keep and what to get rid of as far as importance of sites. To explain further I was going to go into these areas, find the signs themselves, take pictures of them, and add them to a inventory. The inventory itself was an excel document that I set up so that each numbered cell matched up with a picture of the same number. The pictures are in a folder with the numbers of the matching cells underneath. The following cells I would list the were: county, and location, what type of site it was, an location/coordinates of exactly where it is located, and finally a description of the site, or the actual wording on the sign itself. Depending on the type of sign it is would determine how much data the sign would have in the description. I also created a map where i marked all the locations I had visited and each marks a set of coordinates that matched the one in the excel document. I did this so whoever was looking at the inventory could have a physical representation of the locations. In all I did about 100 separate signs throughout the area, limited by weather and construction due to weather that closed me off to some area, and blocked me from others.
Overall the project and the internship itself was fantastic and a great learning experience for my degree. Especially in the last month I got to use a lot of my skills that I've accrued over my degree. This project gave me the freedom to create and make decisions and not just do a predetermined tasks. Lindsey gave me the freedom to create my internship and get the absolute most out of it I could. She gave me wonderful feedback consistently even amidst all the flooding and weather issues they were having in Ellicott City where the office is located. Lindsey and the entire PHG staff were extremely welcoming and wonderful to me. They involved me in conversations about projects that weren't exclusively mine and other things they were working on as well to keep me involved. I learned a lot about how the skills I learned from this degree can be applied in the working world and that's a perspective I never had in till now.
Again I would like to thank anyone that helped me in getting this internship, and everyone that helped me during it. I cant thank you enough for the opportunity.
If you want to see some of the things I've done or keep up with PHG, or want to learn more about it :
https://patapsco.org/about-us/phg_mission/
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