This has yet again been a fairly quiet week. Owen and are are continuing our content projects and awaiting requests for tutoring sessions from students in our respective courses. The course that I am working with, Age of Atlantic Revolutions, has a paper due this Sunday but I have yet to receive any student inquiries for assistance this week. I’m not sure if the students are aware that we’re still available or not. Owen and I have been brainstorming ways to let students know we are here for them if they need us. We’ll have to run a few of our ideas by Dr. Snyder and see what she thinks before we implement anything.
I think one of our biggest challenges so far in this internship has been students feeling shy about asking us for help. I know the first time Dr. Snyder told us that she was happy to look over drafts of our assignments, I felt very nervous about her seeing my unfinished work. I can imagine some students don’t want to appear to need help at this stage in their academic careers. Coming up with ways to soothe these fears may be a big component of making sure we have a constant stream of students to work with. Another approach may be to encourage professors who use History Lab interns to create incentives for working with us. Dr. Snyder had mentioned this concept early on in the semester. She said that at previous institutions that had a similar set up, she would allow for an extra day or a rewrite opportunity if her students used tutoring services. Additionally, getting more professors on board with recommending our services would also be helpful. I know Dr. Snyder ran into some difficulty with this as the professors she approached didn’t have significant papers due until later in the semester.
Owen and I have started working on our Hands-On History Internship Showcase group presentation. We thought it was a good idea to get started early so that we have time to focus on our students who will have papers due at the end of April as well as our own final exams. Having our presentation ready early will also give us plenty of time to meet and practice our presentation so that we can do our best to show our fellow interns all the things we’ve been able to accomplish this semester.
In addition to my current courses, this internship, and a genealogy certification course I’m completing, I have been looking into various topics to research to begin working towards the goal of having something published before I graduate. I have a few ideas in mind, and of course, I am still waiting on hearing if I was selected for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for which I have a very in-depth topic to work on. I’m hoping that I’ll hear about that decision soon. Worst case scenario, I plan to hold off on that research until graduate school since the scope is so large and I could very easily see it becoming a capstone project or thesis. A few of my other ideas are smaller and will probably be something that could be realistically presented for publication before the end of the year.