My Reflections
This page will be regularly updated with weekly posts that focus on assignments, readings, and experiences and their impact on my journey as a historian.
Professionalization Presentation & Mid-term Project Choices
Promoting myself is never an experience I enjoy, but one that is inherently required to establish any sort of career. Perhaps the biggest benefit of the assignment to film myself and explain my experiences as a history major and my personal journey to becoming a history major, is the reflection on my own gifts and abilities. I found I would be much more comfortable teaching a room of strangers about ancient Egyptian textiles or Victorian undergarments than marketing myself in a video. I can only hope that the contents of my presentation can outweigh my deceptively young appearance and my high-pitched voice. Perhaps the only thing more troublesome than repetitive filming every time a video was unacceptable or constantly tweaking the script, would be my technological ineptitude in actually uploading the video.
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Thankfully choosing museum exhibits to visit or the midterm project was slightly less stressful - my greatest difficulty was whittling down the list of possible choices! For me, the mid-term project is not only a learning opportunity, but also a chance for a museum road-trip. My original list had 14 different museums, exhibits, or historical sites ranging from Tallahassee to St. Augustine to Orlando to Key West. As I typically analyze exhibit design whenever I visit a new museum -as well as the way fellow attendees experience the exhibits -I was careful to choose exhibits or museums that I have not visited extensively. In this way I hope to avoid excessive personal bias in my analysis.
Portfolio design
I was unfamiliar with the concept of a digital portfolio before the Professionalizing the Major course. I generally assumed that portfolios were reserved for creative endeavors. After reading about the emphasis on critical thinking and persuasive arguments that are fundamental to a historian’s body of work, the digital portfolio seems not only convenient, but practical. While I intend to use the digital portfolio for this purpose, I’d also like to devote a portion of the portfolio to my experiences with historical interpretation. I suspect that the research skills necessary to create the garments and the communication skills honed while working with the public may be of great interest to prospective employers. Keeping in mind the warnings against excessive information I encountered while researching digital portfolios, I know that I will need to be selective in what extracurricular experiences I showcase in the portfolio.
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I approached the website layout with a marketing mindset – I intend to use this portfolio to market myself to potential employers as well as fellow academics. The site not only needs to be easy to navigate, but there needs to be a professional, clean look to the layout. I endeavored to find a balance between my own preferred color palate and what colors would prove easiest on the eyes of my audience. I wanted to keep in mind the amount of whitespace in the overall layout and avoid a cluttered look. I decided to arrange the navigation menu in such a way that professional pursuits are emphasized over class assignments.
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I am not particularly familiar with website design, so I chose to use Wix.com to build my portfolio. Wix.com offered an Artificial Intelligence-based web builder. While the generated text felt less suited for an academic portfolio and more appropriate for a speech from P.T. Barnum, the suggested layouts and features were invaluable in building my website. I have heavily modified the text to infuse my own voice without sacrificing a sense of professionalism.
Museum Exhibit Analysis
The exhibit analysis assignment might be one of my favorite school assignments I have ever had! I have always been the history nerd who analyzes exhibit design for fun. Historic Spanish Point is such a beautiful, quiet museum and I used to go on field trips there as a child. Now that I am looking at museums with a more critical eye, I was able to appreciate the museum in an entirely new light. As a historical costumer who loves the glamour of the Gilded Age, I fell in love with the story of the “Queen of Chicago” Mrs. Bertha Honore Palmer. The museum has already given permission to visit in historical costume sometime. I did not even remember learning about the mystery of the Burial Mound before! In an age where famous historical mysteries like Roanoke or the identity of Jack the Ripper are potentially being solved, it is so exciting to know there are still mysteries from the past yet to be solved. Quite possibly the highlight of my visit was the chance to teach a couple random ladies about the exhibit while I was studying the exhibit after the tour. The ladies had not taken the tour and were looking for information about the creation of the mound. This information is confined to the timeline on the wall opposite the entrance. I got to share my newfound knowledge with them. They told me I was the highlight of their visit and that they enjoyed learning from me. As somebody who wants to pursue a career educating the public about history, this was an incredibly reaffirming experience. I also took the liberty of researching more about the Palmers. The Palmer House Hotel is still operating in Chicago. I looked up photos of the hotel’s interior and now I absolutely must see it in person someday. Mrs. Palmer helped her husband build an empire as hotel entrepreneur through sheer determination and her resilience is so inspiring!
Revised Presentation Reflection
The biggest challenge for me in making my original video was that all of my experience speaking to others in an academic format was always done in person and never with a script. In fact, the first attempt at a video for the project did not have a script and was over six minutes long. I am very please to report that the initial attempt did not include the word “um.” My first attempts at a script were also too short and I improvised several lines to flesh out a script I was happy with. In order to conquer my “camera fright,” I pretended I was speaking to a room of people, rather than a camera. I was a little disappointed with the peer reviews I received from my classmates. It’s delightful to know a fellow classmate and I share a similar history of changing majors or to hear that my journey is unique or that my video is appreciated, but I also want to know how I can make the video even better. I greatly appreciated your suggestion that I incorporate more specific examples and as a result, I have added mention several specific assignments and a description of my service-learning project to my script. I have also tried to eliminate the vague topics that were previously included in my first presentation. The assignment has made me more mindful of the impact each assignment in this class has on my journey as a historian. Identifying the skills learned in the class through assignments has been an exercise in critical thinking and introspection. This has been my first semester as a history student after a ten-year hiatus following four years as a biology major. The entire course has been invaluable in helping me think like a historian as opposed to a scientist. Introducing myself to people as a history student in a video was a little surreal. After this assignment, I feel significantly more confident in presenting myself as History Professional.
Service Learning Project Reflection
As a volunteer at the Crowley Museum and Nature Center, my responsibilities included greeting guests, acting as a docent, cleaning exhibits and artifacts in the museum’s collections, researching artifacts, creating placards for artifacts, and proposing ideas for new exhibits that utilize the museum’s existing collections. I may have learned even more from connecting with visitors and talking with the museum’s chief executive officer than I did in all my research into the museum’s artifacts. Honestly, the responsibilities the museum gave me felt a little daunting given I do not have prior experience designing exhibits or cataloging artifacts, but I have been relying on the required readings from Dangerous Games and the lessons learned from the museum exhibit analysis assignment. I worked primarily alone in the museum building, where most of the museum’s collections are housed. I thought that the addition of placards would help guests better appreciate the artifacts in the collection, but after I added the placards, I was informed that it made the display easier to navigate for guests because the placards helped direct the viewer’s eye. Identifying rare artifacts felt like finding buried treasure and the CEO shared my excitement for the discoveries. It is particularly fulfilling to know that some of the discoveries I made could help the museum secure more grant money in the future. I am grateful to the museum for allowing me to continue volunteering outside of the requirements for the project, whether remotely researching artifacts and creating social media content or in person to help with arranging exhibits and analyzing artifacts for identification. My second visit to Crowley also happened to involve a phone call during which I learned that my grandmother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and somehow the serenity of Crowley and the rewarding, purpose-driven work was invaluably healing.
Final Course Reflection
Overall, Professionalizing the Major has been a demanding course, but an extremely rewarding one. I initially found the assignment schedule to be a little daunting, but each assignment has been an opportunity to hone a distinct set of skills essential to success as a historian. I was most interested in the exhibit analysis project and the required reading for the class – Dangerous Games by Margaret MacMillan. Not only did the exhibit analysis project and the reading surpass expectations, but they were both invaluable in the service-learning project. Volunteering at Crowley for the project has turned into an incredible, ongoing opportunity. My successes in the class have been a welcome re-affirmation of my decision to return to collegiate studies while working full-time at a particularly stressful job. Given the emphasis on history as more than the memorization of facts, I believe that taking this course in my first semester as a history major will affect how I approach all future history classes in my education. MacMillan’s description of historians as “nosy” and her warnings to manage history with care were always at the forefront of my mind while examining artifacts and designing displays for the museum. I suspect MacMillan’s book will continue to affect how I approach history in my pursuit of a career in the museum field. Of the two other required readings for the class, I found A Pocket Guide to Writing in History by Rampolla to be immensely helpful in completing assignments and Being a Historian by Banner to be thorough, but unengaging. I was still mindful of the writings in Being a Historian while creating placards for Crowley because I wanted to capture the same sense of professionalism while writing in a way that captured audience attention. The course is certainly one whose benefits are influenced by the efforts of each student, and I found it immensely enjoyable.