Throughout my internship experience at the Rockefeller Archive Center, I learned about the critical role that archives play in relation to educational storytelling. I was always drawn to storytelling and knew that video could be quite an impactful medium for engaging audiences with educational lessons. Learning how material is archived, preserved, and made accessible for researchers to build stories helped me see all the possibilities for myself to tell educational stories.
There is just so much history in the vaults at the Rockefeller Archive Center, the material that is stored there holds valuable lessons that we all can learn from, and I believe that will hold true even centuries from now.
For most of my formal educational experience leading up to college I never really found myself engaged with the lessons and my grades suffered. As for my informal educational experience, I was introduced to and engaged in all sorts of lessons ranging in subjects from economics to science. These lessons were introduced through visual stories on platforms like YouTube and they were so engaging that I took it upon myself to learn more about the lessons through books that I borrowed from the library. At the Rockefeller Archive Center, I was able to visually tell a story from the archives that will hopefully engage people the way that I was when learning about new topics through YouTube channels such as TED, and that made this project all the more rewarding.
During my experience I worked on drafting, proposing, and creating a video that introduced a few main points about the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast which caused mass misinterpretation and is the basis for a RE:source story and archival education media literacy resources . Throughout this project I learned how to present and pitch my ideas to team members and supervisors. I learned how to share not only the idea, but my motivations and enthusiasm behind it. I think this is something that I will make sure to focus on as I am starting my career. I learned that I should follow projects where my own passion and skills align with the mission of the organization. I will be sure to use my experience communicating my motivations and ideas in a professional setting further down my career.
This experience has also shown me how productive and fun it can be to be part of a team where I feel valued, where I can receive helpful feedback, and feel that I can contribute to the team with ideas of my own. As I look to make the next steps in my professional career, I will continue to look for impactful educational stories like the one I found at the Rockefeller Archive Center. It was plenty of fun!