FFSS Internship (Fall) Week 10

 Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project:

This week was primarily focused on the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting on 10/24, where I presented in a panel alongside Dr. Lyons, a graduate student, and an adjunct professor/elementary school teacher about student engagement with primary sources. I spent the beginning of this week working on my section of the presentation slides, making sure they were cohesive and uniform with the rest of the panel's slides, as well as constructing the narrative I would be sharing in my presentation. 

We had a FFSS project meeting on Wednesday (10/22) to discuss the progress we are making on the student source packets for the Colmar Pocket Museum. The meeting was between Dr. Lyons, a graduate student and I, and we mostly went through the source packets I had polished in the week prior to set a standard for the rest of the packets moving forward in the editing process. We discussed formatting changes and the idea of included a secondary source of a unit history in each packet for the viewers to look through. This is what I will be working on over the next two weeks before our next meeting. 

On Friday (10/24), I presented in a panel for the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting, which was an incredible opportunity for an undergraduate student like me to have. This was my first academic conference experience, so I had fairly little expectations and I was all the more willing to jump right in and experience what these conferences entail! We presented from 9:30-10:45am, to a group of historians/professors/students, and it was a great success. Our presentation was titled "Pedagogical Methods for Teaching History in the Classroom: Engaging K-12 and College Students through Primary Source Research," and I presented second in the panel. We each got roughly ten minutes to present, which is a more casual round-table approach to a panel from what I had learned during the process of developing the panel. My presentation brought the perspective of an undergraduate student engaging in primary source research inside and outside of the typical classroom setting at UCF. I spoke about my experience in Dr. Lyons' HIS5140 and my experience in this internship so far. I had a very fun time explaining my experiences and how they translate to undergraduate research in general. After each of our ten minute presentations, we engaged with the audience using primary sources. I used some sources from the Stafford Rimes biography that I completed in the Fall 2024 semester, and many of the audience members asked me questions about my experience. After this portion, which lasted around fifteen minutes, we opened the room up for questions, and that took up the rest of our time in the panel. 

This was such an incredible opportunity for someone like me; I have learned so much throughout my time in HIS4150 and this internship, and I am so happy I was able to apply all this learning to a presentation in front of other historians/history students. This is the type of events that I have been wanting to experience before my time as an undergrad runs out, since academic conferences are important to what historians do in their professional career. 

Until next week, I will be working on packets!

See you next week!