This is the end

This week was mainly me preparing the final preparations of my project and presenting it to Dr. Lindsey and the other interns. It was a nerve raking experience that also had me full of excitement ready to share my experiences. Putting together my poster was a difficult process, finding out which graphs and information to put was difficult. There could not be too much information or too little so finding out a good balance was essential. In the end however I kept putting up too much information into the poster, so shortening it was the hardest part. As learning historians we can tend to be a bit wordy with our sentences. I did finally get better though with the shortening of sentences and seeing how my writing needed to be which was short, sweet, and too the point. The graphs were a different story, with the excel spreadsheets I could have created a few different graphs with the information. In the end I decided to create graphs dealing with gender for both cemeteries, iconography comparing all genders in both cemeteries, marker material and one dealing with each cemeteries iconography vs the ones with no iconography. I am proud of how it looks like, it was a lovely poster, the only problem was when I presented it to a bigger audience the poster looked a bit small and the information could not be seen. The way I created it was in power point with the dimensions 4 ft by 3 ft. I did think the font would show on the big screen we used to present, but unfortunately not everything was readable including my charts, only the bones of the project could be seen (graph, and paragraph layout. Overall this semester has been everything I hoped for. I wanted to try something different, to see what else my history degree can be used for. Many of us get into the thought of thinking all we can ever do is teach. That is not the case, and was something that I never really wanted to do in the first place. I did not just want to work strictly in anthropology, I wanted a middle ground between the two. I found that I can do both, maybe not what I did exactly for my internship, but something similar. I want to do field work and be behind the scenes interpreting data and doing research before hand. During this semester there were things that had to be adjusted, but was difficult to adjust mainly my problem of writing, as history majors we are almost trained to write a certain way. In different they might require you to write in a different way, which was the case for me, I love adding little details and making my writing seem almost narrative. The problem with this is that it is not short, sweet, and too the point which is needed in this type of environment. So it too took a bit too adjust. This is something that I would recommend for other history majors, to see if what you want to do is something you want to do after an internship. It gives an incite into the work environment of someone who works in history. I hope to do more work like this in the future and get more opportunities to do field work.