Samantha Froemming's History Blog

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This is my last blog post for this semester, which is so sad! I have really loved this internship and I will miss it over winter break, however I am coming back in the spring semester so I will look forward to January!  This week has been very different than anything else I have been doing all semester, but I am in the midst of finals, so the work on the packets slowed down, but I engaged with other aspects of the internship. The first thing I prioritized this past week was applying for funding towards the Florida Conference of Historians in January 2026. I am waiting to hear back about the possibility of funding, so hopefully it works out! I suppose I will update in January since that is when I would receive it. This was my first time applying for conference travel and registration funding, so it was a learning process on how it works with UCF's Student Government Association. I had...

  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/...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This update will be very similar to last week because I have been working toward the same goal: standardizing and editing the Colmar Pocket Museum student submission packets. I have made more progress since last week, however, which is great! Like I explained in my previous post, the time it takes to edit these packets is the major roadblock in getting them finished quickly. The standardization process is slow, especially when students do a great job of including a lot of information! Although it has taken me much longer than I anticipated to complete these editing steps, the packets I have come close to finalizing look great, and I think the Museum will be very pleased with them. To give a frame of reference to how the timeline of editing the packets it, I have made it through one entire packet since last week, and I am currently half way through another packet. This is three (and a hal...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week I have been focusing on editing more of the student submissions for the Colmar Pocket Primary Source Packets. This process has consisted mostly of me standardizing the packets to look uniform and professional, which includes adding borders, resizing images to fit the page as large as possible, editing and polishing descriptions of the sources, and checking to make sure the formatting is correct. I also focus on making sure the citations are correctly formatted, the links to the sources are the correct links, and that the student included all of the possible sources for the soldier they researched.  I am supposed to have all ten of my assigned packets completed soon, because we will continue to work on and eventually send them to the Colmar Pocket Museum in France for review and use. However, I have been moving much slower than I would have hoped to, because the source packe...

  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 ...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Over the weekend, I finished editing the two biographies that I was assigned to standardize before sending them to the Colmar Pocket Museum in France. It took a while to get them both more uniform and standardized within the template given that they were created by two different students, but it was an enjoyable process. The most challenging part of the process was making sure every source that we could find was included, and inserting any sources that the original packet did not have. This allowed me to do the type of research that I did for my biography for Stafford Rimes in the Fall 2024 semester, which I continue to do while editing the biography for this internship. This assignment combines that research process, and learning the skill of editing which I have become accustomed to over the course of this internship.  In the background, I have also been included in the panel for t...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This past week has been a continuation of the Colmar Pocket Museum source packets from HIS3600. Since my last post, I have been checking the student submissions for the source packets to make sure all of the links are correct, the sources are credible and are the correct person, and that they are ready to be polished for the museum. For the most part, the ten packets I was assigned to review contained a good amount of sources that established a solid foundation to the packets, with only a few exceptions. The majority of the "errors" within the packets are links that do not connect to the correct place, or that the descriptions of the sources are wordy or hard to understand. There were a few that definitely need a good amount of editing and polishing, but they still presented good information that should be utilized within the final packets.  Many of the students were able to ...