My First Big Girl Job

When people ask me how I would describe myself, one of the things that comes to mind is how huge of a history nerd I am. I feel as though I need to make that perfectly clear before someone begins reading my blog, because there will be a lot of history nerding out. I'm sorry in advance. But when I say nerd, I truly mean it. I am that kid that will stay home on Friday nights reading history textbooks. I constantly watch the History Channel. I live for debates on why the USSR no longer exists, or what would have happened if the South won. Ask any of my friends and they absolutely dread once I begin explaining what the historical significance of something is, and make it last a good 20 minutes. This being said, it is clear why my internship at the Women and Leadership Archives in Piper Hall is such a match for me. I am surrounded by other history nerds, and I get to do something that I feel is making a contribution. I always ask myself why something is considered historically relevant, and with this internship I get to be a part of the process. This is a dream come true for me.

Last week was my first week of work, and it was absolutely amazing. This is my first "big girl" job and I'm not going to lie, I was terrified. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. What do I wear on the first day? What if I don't know enough history? What if I accidently exclude the most important important part of the collection? What if I mess up, basically? I was clearly way more nervous than I ever needed to be. When I got to Piper we talked with Beth, who no joke is one of the sweetest women I have ever met. She gave us a more in depth tour of the archives and explained what we were supposed to do. She gave each of us a project and just let us go, which was absolutely amazing. I did not feel the stress of having someone watch every decision that I made but let me figure things out on my own. Beth, along with two graduate students, were more than willing to answer questions and checked in on us. It was a great balance of getting to discover everything on my own, but knowing that someone was there that would make sure I did not screw up too badly. I was still nervous, none-the-less.

My collection that I am working on is about a Christian center that works for justice, and it is very cool to see what they have done. To see outlines of meetings that detail what they truly care about, and the different projects that they started to help better their community, or an entirely different community in Central America, is extremely cool. It is weird because they are still an operating company, so I know that what I am looking at is only a few years old. It does not have that "old time" feeling to them yet. Then I found notes from the 1970s, which are so cool! It shows what was happening in their community, their thought process towards social problems, and how they planned to fix them. It really gave a clear view into the society that they were trying to better. It is almost hard to put into words what it feels like looking at something like that. I begin thinking of everything that I know was happening at the same time, and allow the new information to fit into that working picture. I told you there would be some history nerding out. I feel like even after one box of information, I have not seen enough. I feel as though there is so much for me to go through and discover. Thank goodness I have a completely full box waiting for me on Monday morning. It's hard to explain, but it feels incomplete. It might be because the box that I just processed was mostly that organization involvement in a third party charity, and not really about my center specifically, but we will see what happens on Monday. At points it was challenging to make the judgement call on whether something is relevant or not, but I feel like it is getting easier. It is definitely taking longer than I had thought it would, though. That could be because I'm looking at all the things that I find very cool and trying to learn about them.

It was a great first week of work. I am actually looking forward to Monday when I can dive back into everything. I'm still a little nervous about everything, but after spending time with everyone else in the WLA, I feel a lot better about it. It is a comfortable and easy going environment, and I think that that makes a world of difference. I really don't want this to come off as completely sucking up to the WLA, either. I mean everything that I say and would not write it if I did not believe it 100%. I'm not going to write if something is bad, because frankly that would be between me and the WLA, but this place has already made such a great impression on me that I am sure I made the right choice for where my first big girl job would be.