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Week 15 | Endings

  Hello all, Aaron here for the final week of the Olustee internship. I’m in the thick of finals and working on my internship presentation, and it does feel overwhelming at points. Admittedly I’m excited for the lesser workload that the summer semester will provide, as I’m only going to be taking two classes, one in Session A and another in Session B. I’ll also be looking for a first job over the summer…so I can only hope that goes well enough.           During our meeting today, Dr. Gannon answered many of our lingering questions about the internship. She didn’t comment much about the students and their continued work on the project; given that this week is the end of the semester I imagine many of them did not get the good grades they would have liked. Earlier in the week, Dr. Gannon said she had given her students clearance to email the other interns and I to answer any questions they might have about their work, and just like last week, no one reached out to any of us. Dr. Gannon
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Week 14 | Appointments

          Hello everyone, Aaron here for the penultimate week of the Olustee project internship. Finals are practically here, and while I haven’t been significantly stressed over their looming threat, I’m aware that next week is going to be packed with work, both from other assignments and final projects. I have an exam, a final essay, a smaller writing assignment, a video project, and the internship showcase presentation to contend with for the next two weeks. This week in the internship was pretty tame, although this actually was not the expected nor optimal outcome.           Last week I mentioned that I was assigned two time slots, on this Monday and Wednesday from 10 am to 1 pm, that I would be available to help Dr. Gannon’s students with their research into the Olustee dead. I had prepared my schedule for those days around that time, saving the most intensive work for after the “office hours” were up and postponing my daily walk until later that day. I opened some tabs in Ancestr
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Week 13 | Future Appointments

          Hello all, Aaron here with another update on the Olustee Project internship. This week, while more eventful than the last, has been complicated by an external factor that I hope won’t continue to be a problem for the rest of the semester. Said external factor hasn’t done much to affect the work for my other four classes, but it has definitely impacted the internship: my car isn’t working.           I don’t own my car; it’s my parents’ car that I typically use on Tuesdays and Thursdays to attend my singular in-person class at the UCF Main Campus. I was planning on using it this week and next when our appointments to help out Dr. Gannon’s students started up, but last week we discovered that there were a multitude of problems with the vehicle. I’m not a car person, so I couldn’t describe precisely what happened, but it required us to surrender our vehicle to a mechanic for repairs about a week ago, and it’s still being tended to. This put my meetings in a tough spot: they were
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Week 12 | Stepping Back

          Hello everyone, Aaron here with the twelfth week of the Olustee internship. This week hasn’t been very eventful, both in the internship and outside of it. I had an exam in one of my classes that was relatively easy, and I have one more coming up on Sunday that I unfortunately cannot do before then. So, I’m stuck with work on the weekends, which is fine, but isn’t something I try to allow often if I can help it.           The most significant thing to come out of this week is the attempts the other interns and I have initiated to get everyone on the same page for the internship showcase on April 26. It's been harder than I was expecting: I emailed both of the interns working with me a day or two after the message was sent out, and while one of them replied, the other hasn’t. I’m sure he has a good reason to have not replied, but I am worried that the time slots the other intern and I agreed upon won’t be available by the time he does get back to us. I feel like I’ve kept t
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Week 11 | Class Instructions

          Hello all, Aaron here for another week of the Olustee internship. This week was relatively straightforward in terms of work, and even the meeting we had today wasn’t very long. Now that us interns have handed off the burden of Olustee research to Dr. Gannon’s students, we will have less investigating to do ourselves. As such, I actually don’t know what we will be tasked with next week.           This week, Dr. Gannon instructed us to create guidelines for the research her students would be conducting. This week, she split them into groups based on their stated proficiencies, such as organizing sources in proper formatting, or directing research efforts. She also split the groups by how many sources were available for each of their respective regiments. The 8th USCT became one of the biggest groups, since this week we found all of their CMSRs (compiled military service records) on the National Archives’ website, which is a big find since the only other sites that hosted the 8t
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Week 10 | Regimental History

          Hello everyone, Aaron here for the tenth week of the Olustee project. Spring Break was a welcome reprieve from stressful university work, and a good time to hang out with my friends, but now is the time to get back to research for the internship and studying for my other four courses. For whatever reason, work for my other classes was relatively light this week, although I do have a project coming up in one of my upper level courses.            I spent the extra time diving into the regimental history of the 7th New Hampshire Volunteers that I first mentioned in my week 8 blog post. The source is incredibly thorough; not only does it mention the fate of any particular soldier at Olustee, but it also details when they were mustered in and out, and if captured, if they had ever been released in a prisoner exchange or paroled. Many of the soldiers that had “no further record” detailed in the original spreadsheet actually did have a record listed in the regimental history; I can
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Week 8 | Class Project Begins

  Hello, Aaron here for yet another week of the Olustee Project. Today was a light week for my other classes, owing to the fact Spring Break is next week, although I did have an exam in one of my classes yesterday (on the bright side, it was online so I didn’t need to drive to the main campus). As such, I had more time to work on research for the internship, which I made use of. Although, I should mention that the scope of my research has changed a little after this week’s meeting—let me explain.           To sum it up simply, I am no longer working with the 35th USCT, my fellow intern Jared is, and I have taken on research of the 7th New Hampshire Volunteers. This is because Jared had started research on the 35th under the misconception that was one of his assigned regiments. Dr. Gannon asked if I wanted to let him take over research on the 35th, and since I believed he had a better grasp on the unit than me, I accepted. I’ve consistently had difficulty researching the 35th because
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