Hey Mom, I Struggle with Not Working In a Team!

Hey there! My name is Morgan Miller and for my graduate internship, I was able to work at the Maryland State Archives (MSA) in the Special Collections Department. For my blog posts, I have been going through different parts of my internship experience starting with the beginning, then the middle, and the end. My focus has been: what is the best way to make a collection accessible to the public? We have come to my last blog post and thus, we have arrived at the end of my internship experience.

For this section of my internship experience I was able to work on various smaller projects like cataloging paper records, cataloging glass plate negatives, moving Civil War era Maryland flags, and trying to read eighteenth century letters. It was a whirlwind of an ending because I worked on many different cataloging projects! However, one thing that I did notice was how working alone is not always the best thing for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working alone. When I work alone I am able to power through a collection and get it processed in a very quick turnaround. When I was able to start and finish processing a collection quickly it gave me so much joy. I was so ecstatic to be able to get great work done quickly.

I did notice that the more consecutive days that I went not talking to anyone during my day of collections processing, the more isolated I felt in general. Processing became tiring and I started working slower because I didn’t have the same zeal that I had at the beginning of the summer. However, if I was able to have lunch with someone or collaborate on an idea with someone during the day, I felt much more equipped to do my work and do it well.

This internship taught me how to think about my needs and the needs of others. If I am able to work here again I think I would try to make more friends to have lunch with and ask for more team projects alongside my processing work. I want to apply the lessons I learned from this internship to my life and other jobs in my future. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my MSA internship experience and would recommend it to anyone. The staff at the Maryland State Archives is amazing and everyone wants to see you grow professionally and in general. I am so lucky to be able to learn this information about myself so I can apply it to other experiences in the future.