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 lamented over that fact, but seemed to be over it at this point. She also told us about the future of the internship after this semester, and how she’d be directing research into the regiments that participated in the battle themselves, alongside collecting information on their dead like in this semester.

        I figured that writing this blog post would give me a good opportunity to look over how this project has impacted me (although not too much, as I still have the internship presentation to reflect at!). I think I’ve learned a fair bit from the internship, most notably the process that goes into historical research. Dr. Gannon commented on this as well during our meeting today; many people who claim to want to be historians shy away from the profession once they learn about the true nature of its work. The internship was a lot of pouring over records in databases, which is understandably not what most people think as interesting or engaging. While I do agree with this point to an extent, I feel that naysayers blow it out of proportion. It’s not particularly boring work if you have a goal, and are genuinely interested in the information you’re looking for (which I was). I also appreciated the fact that the research I did will end up contributing to a positive outcome: the recognition of the dead at the Olustee battlefield. Not only did I have a goal to keep me motivated, it was a positive one at that. While I probably won’t be able to see the end of this internship, I can hope that my work produces a positive change. And even if it doesn’t, I can still say that I tried. Aaron, signing out.