This week, like last week, and the week before that, was—as usual—really tedious and underwhelming. It becomes increasingly difficult to find ways to cope with an internship that as it turns out, isn’t the best fit for you. I obviously knew this coming into it, but I was honestly just grateful to have internship after the others fell through at the end of the last semester. I took out a loan to go to grad school, and Sallie Mae definitely told me herself that if for any reason I wasn’t enrolled in a certain number of credits a semester she would ask for all her coins back, which, uh, I don’t have.
So to avoid that I thought it would be cool to continue with the Oviedo History Harvest project, seeing it through to the (digitized) end. But I also wanted to develop practical skills. Now that I’m entering the adult world—eek, do I count as an adult? Quarter life crisis ensuing in 3…2….1— I feel that its important for me to have skills that aren’t just reading and writing. How does that differentiate me from anybody else in my program or any other History graduate programs across the United States. We can all read and write and think critically. That’s why were in grad school. What can I offer, what skills do I have that will make me marketable so that I can have a career that doesn’t involve wearing an itchy uniform and asking people if they want to try our new double-stuffed Oreo McFlurry?
Listen, my family doesn’t exactly believe in failure. There is no doubt, an ulcer forming in stomach because of it. Also a lot of general anxiety disorder and a little OCD thrown in for good measure. I say all of this to say that curating metadata brings up a lot of my anxities, fear of failure being one of them. If I mess this up—and fail this internship in the process—RICHES will probably find another intern to fix it up, no biggie. But, it really stresses me out that I can’t seem to get the hang of this or the reading material. What does that say about me as an student? Am I even cut out to be an historian?
I think a huge issue here is that curating metadata doesn’t stimulate me. Being in front of a computer doing repetitive work never came to mind when I thought about what I would do as an historian—writing monographs aside—but I knew there would be times where I would have to do things that I didn’t like. That’s a part of life obviously. Everybody does things they don’t like. That’s ok.
So what do I want to do as an historian? I want to challenge people; make them uncomfortable. I want to make someone reassess everything they think they know about history and to question it. But most importantly I want to help make a difference. I’m totally an annoying social justice warrior. When I think about the first internship I had planned to do—and will hopefully do eventually—I think about the opportunity I had to help people who would otherwise not be able to save and preserve their church. It’s these real world connections that drew me to public history, not theory and rhetoric.
I think about what’s happened in Charleston, what continues to happen every day in this country where people who look like me are gunned down by police and average citizen alike, with no retribution. Where does metadata fit into that? Where is my connection?
Sorry for the depressing post. This week was rough.
Porsha
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