FFSS Internship (Fall) Week 13

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

These blog posts are pretty repetitive as of recently, since I have been working towards the same goal. But that is good, because it means that we are making progress! I have been consistently working on editing the student submission packets for the Colmar Pocket Museum primary source packets in HIS3600. So far, I have "completed" four out of the ten packets I have been assigned to edit. I say completed in quotations because I am just the first step, and then they will have to be reviewed with the graduate students' work as well, and then we can finalize them for future use. I have enjoyed this process, and I am hoping to get a few more done by the end of next week. I want to try to get all ten reviewed and edited before the end of the semester, however everyone's busy schedules may determine that to change. Until then, though, the work continues!

This Wednesday (11/12), we had a meeting with three undergraduate students who are currently working with the FFSS project for a service learning element of Dr. Lyons' HIS3600 course. These are the same students that turned in packets for the current project underway, so they have experience working with this material. They have been tasked with creating more packets with new soldiers, and making sure they are standardized to our structure and template. The meeting consisted of Dr. Lyons, a graduate student, and I showing the other undergraduate students how to make sure the packets look standard to the way we have been editing them. Before the meeting, I created a checklist for future editors to use as a guide for the editing process, so we used this to show the undergraduate students our example of what an edited packet looks like. This was a good experience to continue learning how to be an information communicator within this project. I enjoy helping and teaching people, so this was a good opportunity to continue honing this skill. 

Also, good news! Our project was accepted to the Florida Conference of Historians, so we will be presenting in Gainesville sometime in January! We have not decided on a date for when we will present, but I am sure that will come soon. In the meantime, I am in the process of applying for funding to travel to the conference through SGA and possibly OUR, which is a new process for me. I have been learning how applying for funding works through UCF, which is a great thing to learn how to do, especially since graduate school is in my future. I do not have any updates on that just yet, but when I do, I will share. 

Additionally, I will be continuing this internship into the spring 2026 semester! Dr. Lyons and I decided that I should stay on the project through my last semester of my undergrad at UCF, which I am so excited about. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to continue working on this project and making sure the work I did this semester can be used to continue helping the project develop and grow! I will most likely be doing the same sort of tasks, so we can achieve our goal of working with the Colmar Pocket Museum to publish these packets for them. 

Coming up is the internship showcase over zoom on November 21, so on top of working on the packets, I will be putting together a presentation to discuss what I have been doing this semester with the FFSS project. I will update next week on how it goes! 

See you next week!