Intern Spotlight

Name: Ella Douglas

Hometown: Bishop, GA

Internship Period: Summer 2012

What am I doing here at the Russell Library?
I love museums and everything associated with them, making an internship in archives interesting and relevant to my career goals. This internship taught me about the different spheres of museums and archives, so now I must decide which aspect appeals to me most. During this internship, I took the Stovall and McKay Family Papers through the stages to make it available to the public. I went through the boxes, organized the contents into files, labeled everything, and wrote a finding aid, now available online.

Education: Pending a B.A. from Wake Forest University in Anthropology with a double minor in Linguistics and Classical Studies. I am now beginning the daunting task of thinking about graduate school.

I knew I was sucker for history when…
I learned about the Tudors in elementary school. I was particularly interested in the character of “Bloody Mary”. College steered me towards anthropology as I am fascinated by people and everything that comes along with the study of man. Reading the correspondence in the collection allowed me to learn about history, but not on the grand scale of events that comes from history classes, but the struggles and occurrences of daily life.

The best part of my internship so far…Has been meeting everyone who works here. They have been very welcoming and have tried to recruit me to each of their graduate alma maters! Besides that, I have enjoyed each stage of the internship. I appeased the neat-freak in me by organizing the correspondence. Writing the finding aid challenged me to succinctly summarize the collection. Also, I can now go online and see tangible evidence through the finding aid of what I accomplished this summer.

If I wasn’t spending time in the archives, my alter ego would be pursuing a career in…
Traveling for National Geographic. I want to travel wherever and whenever I want; my main goal is to visit all seven continents, four down and three to go!

On days off, I’ll be…Hanging out with my high school friends. Glimpsing at the world of employment with internships, we only have the weekends to spend together.

In five years I see myself…Hopefully with a Master’s degree and employed. Every day presents a different goal -- wavering between collections management, curator, and of course archives. I definitely like more urban settings, so I’ll probably settle in a city like Washington D.C., it has enough job options if nothing else!