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 Ancestry and navigated to the databases for the 7th New Hampshire and the 8th US Colored, all ready to answer a student’s questions as quickly and efficiently as possible. Well…on Monday, no student emailed me. I was a bit surprised by this, but as a college student I intimately understand that students tend to procrastinate things even if it's not in their best interest. I figured I’d see someone on Wednesday, but was a bit worried as if several people came to me all at once, I’d have to hold multiple Zoom meetings in succession, or run the risk of not being able to get to everyone when they were able.

        Luckily (or rather, unluckily), I didn’t have to worry about that—not a single soul showed up on Wednesday either. I entertained two possibilities: either the students didn’t need any help because their research was going very well, or they grossly overestimated their skill working on the project. In today’s meeting with Dr. Gannon, I got my answer. The other interns and I asked each other how our meetings went while Dr. Gannon was fixing a mic issue, and both of them had the same experience: no student reached out to them either. And when Dr. Gannon fixed her mic and began to recount her side of the process, she described the students’ research drafts as…less than adequate. Aside from the diligent performances of one or two students (which she mentioned she might give internships), the majority of the work was not up to her standards, which she was naturally upset about given how much work we put in to make it simple for the students. She says she’ll give them a second chance, which might require us to hold an appointment or two next week, but after that if the results are still subpar, the students will just get low grades. Dr. Gannon reiterated that this didn’t reflect badly on us, as we did everything that was asked of us. If anything, she was annoyed that we might have to pick up the students’ lack so late into the semester. It's a little frustrating to hear of the difficulty that the students had in the assignment, though this might be selfish of me to feel, as just because I didn’t think the instructions were hard to follow doesn’t mean that everyone sees it the same way.