FFSS Internship (Spring) Week 3

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

To follow-up on my last blog post, I will start by discussing my experience at the Florida Conference of Historians! On Saturday (1/24/26), we presented the Florida France Soldier Stories project in Gainesville at the Florida Conference of Historians, which was a great experience. Our panel began at 1pm, and we presented to a small group of (mostly UCF) other undergraduate students, graduate students, and UCF faculty. Our presentation consisted of a brief overview of the project over its lifetime (about 10 years), an understanding of why and how this work is being done, what the role of graduate and undergraduate students are, the website, and the new partnership with the Colmar Pocket Museum. Each of us had a section where we explained certain aspects of the project, and I was tasked with introducing the new partnership and projects in Dr. Lyons' undergraduate courses. I loved being able to present this portion of our panel, because I have been involved with this aspect since it began last semester! My experience working with the primary source packets has allowed me to become very comfortable with the work that we are doing in this new expansion, and it was great practice to explain this part of our project to a room of people. 

Overall, the presentation went very well, and it was a wonderful experience to watch other scholars and students present their research. I enjoy attending and presenting at conferences, so this past weekend was very fun. I am so grateful for all of these opportunities, as they would not be possible without my involvement in projects and internships like this! 

On Wednesday (1/28), we had our weekly FFSS meeting to go over our progress on editing the primary source packets for the upcoming podcast project in the EUH3451 course and to prepare for our introduction of the primary source packet project to the HIS3600 course. I have "polished" two out of my five packets that will need to be ready for the introduction of the project in EUH3451 in February (around the 24th), so now they will need to be checked by the project manager and then Dr. Lyons to make any changes before the deadline. For the presentation in HIS3600, we prepared the same slideshow as last semester, making minor changes here and there for updated aspects since the first semester we had the class do the project. I was tasked with presenting the structure of the packets, the three sections that will be included (Early Life, Military Service, and Legacy or Post Service Life), and giving some examples of the types of sources that the students should expect to find throughout the process of their research. 

On Thursday (1/29), we presented the project to the HIS3600 course, which went very well! I think this semester we did a much better job of presenting a cohesive project to the students, and I feel as though they did not leave with as many questions (or confused looks on their faces) as the students did last semester. I think what helped this the most was the section that the graduate assistant presented, which showed the students how they would be conducting this research inside of the databases that we frequently use. I was able to help the students navigate through our model packet (the packet I edited last semester!) and answer any questions they had. This is always such a great learning experience for me, since I am passionate about education and teaching students (or anyone) how to do research. In all, this introduction presentation went great, and I think the students will do a great job. 

Until the next deadline (roughly Valentine's Day), I will be editing more packets! 

See you next week!

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