This week has been incredibly busy and I have lots of news to share! Owen and I have been hard at work developing our presentation for the Hands-on History Internship Showcase. This week we finished our final draft of the script and made some changes and tweaks to our PowerPoint Presentation. We did a quick run-through to get a feel for it. We also figured out what images we needed to add and set up a plan to collect those. Next week we plan to add those images and do another run-through to practice our script. Hopefully, we’ll also be able to squeeze in another practice before the showcase. I know I’m a little more nervous about it than I probably need to be, but public speaking has never been my favorite thing. Getting in a lot of practice should serve to calm my nerves though.
On the tutoring side of things, Dr. Snyder has been trying to get other professors on board with using our services for their students’ final papers, however, she has been having difficulty in getting them involved. It’s a shame really because I’m sure the survey level students would greatly benefit from our services. As much as I love working with higher-level students, it would be nice to work with some survey-level students as well to get a feel for the differences academically.
In the meantime, she’s given us a few other projects to make sure we’re keeping busy. She asked us to work on some additional content specific to the courses that we’re helping with. She suggested things like quizzes or visual timelines, but she trusts our judgment and gives us a lot of creative freedom. I came up with an interactive image featuring a source in the first scholarly monograph that is studied in her Age of Atlantic Revolutions course, An Empire Divided by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. This interactive image can be inserted into one of her web course modules to add a visual component and help students gain a deeper understanding of the topic.
In other news, I was chosen for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship! I’m so thrilled to have been given this opportunity and I absolutely cannot wait to start my research!
Today was also supposed to be the induction ceremony for the Alpha Gamma Chi chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society which I was accepted into this term. However, it seems that there are some difficulties with the current student leadership, so, unfortunately, the ceremony had to be canceled. I am definitely disappointed in this. However, I’m not one to stand idly by while change can be affected, so I have offered my services to Dr. Snyder, who is the faculty advisor for PAT. When the current student leadership term has ended, I have decided to run for the position of President or Vice-President. I know that the PAT was severely affected by COVID, but I firmly believe that it can be revitalized and brought back to its former glory.