Practical History Experience at TSA

            By the end of my internship for the TSA Historian I had learned a lot. Working at the TSA HQ was my first office work experience so I learned how to do things like send professionally formatted emails. Which is easy but is still important to know.

Updating the Modality statistics taught me about research. Some statistics were easy to update like the aviation modality, which had recently updated statistics that were easy to find with a google search. Other modalities like the passenger/freight rail and highway modalities had statistics that were hard to find and were not updated regularly. The harder to find statistics taught me how to better search for information and that some websites had people I could contact to help me find information, like the archivist for the Department of transportation. Learning how to Research information is useful for my classwork and a potential history career.

 Filming the interviews and editing the transcripts for the TSA YouTube video series: “Historian Presents: Did You Know.” Gave me experience interviewing people who lived through historical events. I learned how to ask relevant questions and gained experience being on camera. While editing the transcripts I learned that speaking is much more efficient than writing. Our mistakes and interruptions during filming would take a minute or two in the recording but that would be transcribed as a few paragraphs or a page in the transcript. Editing the transcript was similar to adding a quote to an essay, taking the important information and removing the unnecessary parts while still getting the point across. Overall, my internship taught me important skills for office work and a career in history. Researching topics, interviewing people, properly quoting and citing sources are all important skills for a career in history and more immediately are useful for completing my classwork.