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Higher Education & Academic Research

  • Advise TX

    Spring 2017  

    Position: College Advisor
    Student: English Senior

    It first begins by getting to know the lay of the land. Each intern for Advise TX will be placed in a different high school around Austin; Atkins High School, KIPP High School, Travis High School etc. depending on whether you have a car, or not. That being said, each internship experience will be different. For this internship, there is not just one “Day in the Life.” For example, at KIPP high schools they are very college driven, the advisor’s data seems to be higher numbers than other schools, because of the requirements their school has on the students. This does not mean that the advisor has an easy job, they are still required to provide their students with the information they need to actually get in and go to a higher education institution. At Travis High school, my internship placement, it is a lot more different than that of KIPP. Since it is not as college driven as KIPP, the Advise TX advisor has to make sure all of their students are actually aware it is time to think about college, and to know that the GO center is there to help them prepare for life after graduation. So, in this sense each experience is different. Each advisor has an abundance of work to do, so as an intern it is your job to help with the details, with presentations, with FASFA help etc.

    At Travis High School, most of my tasks required creativity, detailed oriented awareness and a love for crafts. The intern’s day to day work depends on what the advisor at your school needs to do, complete or get started on. For the most part, I came in right after their lunch (unfortunately missing most of the day’s action, considering a lot of the seniors only have free time to complete their documents, forms, applications during that time) and was greeted with forms that needed faxing, or other miscellaneous tasks. However, after coming in for a couple of weeks, the advisor and I came up with daily tasks and weekly tasks. For example, I came up with the idea of having a “SCHOOL OF THE WEEK” bulletin board, allowing students to simply walk past the board and get to know a new school, such as Texas A&M San Antonio, or Sam Houston state. Each Friday, I already knew one of the main tasks would be picking a school, and getting relevant information about it: percentage of first gen students, if the school is a HBSU, tuition etc. And, the advisor at Travis always wanted to use a bigger bulletin board to create the GO CENTER CALENDAR, so each month it was my duty to update the calendar and post up scholarship deadlines, important dates and any other event the juniors and seniors needed to be aware of. Each school will be different. Each college area will have different tasks regarding the same goal: college readiness. 

  • National Student Leadership Conference

    Summer 2017

    Position: Business and Entrepreneurship Assistant Team Advisor
    Student: Economics Freshman

    During this last month of July, I worked as an Assistant Team Advisor at the National Student Leadership Conference (NSLC), at Yale University. This conference is held throughout 10 different prestigious universities throughout the nations, and it specializes in more than 20 different fields that range from STEM to business to performance arts and more. The mission of the conference is to help high school students explore career options and have an insight into the field of the program they chose.

    As an Assistant Team Advisor, I had a varied range of responsibilities. The main responsibility I was in charge of was the group of students I guided side by side with a Team Advisor throughout the 9-day program on site. As an Assistant Team Advisor, it was my job to assist the Team Advisor in meetings and with the different simulations our students had to go through. However, the opportunity to do more was always present, and I always tried to look for one. The students had two different simulations: a product pitch for a product the students had to come up with and prepare in the span of 7 days, and a multinational corporation facing different situations in the span of a fiscal year. It was in these simulations that I was able to help my students the most, as I used the knowledge that I had gained in my different classes to guide them through the decisions they had to make as a team.

    My second biggest responsibility was a class I was in charge of preparing and teaching. As I came to site for the second half of the summer, I was paired with another Team Advisor to teach a previously prepared class on International Business. This was part of a series of lectures prepared by the staff on different topics such as Marketing, Business & Las, Resumé Building & Interview Skills, and Leadership.

    Our days were long and full of work, which made keeping my normal routine harder that I expected. Our responsibilities would usually begin around 8:30 AM with activities throughout the day that would go on until 10:15 PM, with breaks for lunch and dinner in between. After that, we’d have responsibilities as RAs to do RA checks in every room at 11 PM; finally, we’d end the day with a logistics meeting that would usually go on until 11:45 PM.

  • Princeton University

    Spring 2021

    Position: Research Assistant 
    Major: Economics & Mathematics Junior
    Name: Ximena Mercado Garcia

    This spring semester, I have been working as a research assistant to Prof. Christopher Neilson, an applied microeconomist at Princeton University. His research focuses on the study of public policies and regulation in education markets. I found this position after attending a virtual conference called ASHE Hispanic Pre-Doctoral Pipeline Conference, which was meant to connect Hispanic students with prominent pre-doc hiring institutions. The organizers of this event sent an email regarding this internship opportunity, which I became interested in. As part of my duties, I have helped Prof. Neilson advance his research documenting the prevalence of centralized admission systems in education markets throughout the world. I have been updating a spreadsheet on the status of the admission system per education level (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of each one of the countries. I have also written descriptive paragraphs for some of them, which will be later used to update the project’s website. My favorite thing about this internship experience is the support and mentorship I have received from my supervisor and the research team. I have gained a better understanding of predoctoral fellowships and graduate school by talking with other people at Princeton. This has helped me confirm my desire to pursue a research career in economics. I’m excited about starting to apply to predoctoral fellowships next semester!

  • Project SEED at UT Austin

    Fall 2020

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Geography & Sustainability Studies Senior

    Student Name: Emma Martinez 

    Project SEED operates under the direction of ​Dr. Su Yeong Kim, a faculty member in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. This is a research study on Mexican American children and families, with the goal of understanding how children who translate between Spanish and English for their English-limited speaking parents are affected in the areas of: children’s health, academic development and socio-emotional development. I came across a listing for this research project on Handshake.

    My position entails working as a research assistant, specifically as an office RA. I help schedule trainings for field RAs, who actually go and interact with the families involved in the study. I coordinate the trainings for both ‘health measurements’ and ‘computer task’ activities. These are duties that the field RAs must know how to do when they go to the families’ homes and collect data.

    My favorite thing about this internship has been that Dr. Kim really makes an effort to get to know everyone and teach us what the research is all about. She helps us understand how each of our jobs are valuable to the overall project and how advanced academic research really works. I feel like I know a lot more now about what goes on behind the scenes of large-scale projects like this.

  • The University of Texas at Austin - History Department

    Fall 2018

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Senior

    During this last semester I participated in the Public History internship under the supervision of Dr. Julie Hardwick and Andrew Akhlaghi. I was working directly for the History Department of the University of Texas to create a project for the 130th anniversary celebration.

    I was not the only student in the internship, there were 4 of us total all working on different projects to present at the 130th anniversary party. I was assigned the project of creating a timeline of the History Department. Part of my task was to use a software called ClioVis, a timeline software developed by a professor in the department. We were given a fair amount of free reign in deciding what to do our project on. Andrew had given us a few suggestions but was very open to letting us explore whatever we were interested in.

    Every week we met with Andrew as a group to discuss our individual projects, read and critique each other's projects, and discuss the ins and outs of the anniversary party and what our roles would be. We also met with Andrew one on one every week to discuss our personal projects more in depth. Each of the meetings lasted about an hour (like a normal class). On our own time, we then spent hours and hours every week either in the archive centers or interviewing people that could help us gather information to complete our projects.

    The day of the celebration we met up in a room in Garrison at 9 am and stayed there until the end of the celebration (4pm) presenting our projects. There were many events going on that day and people weaved in and out of various rooms in the building, all of them held research, panels, faculty led discussions, interviews, or tours of campus and the archival center. When someone entered our room and walked up to our poster or presentation that was when we presented our semester's worth of work.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Senior

    For the past semester I have been interning with the History Department as a Public History intern. The purpose of this internship was for the 130th anniversary of the department. As interns were to research history about the history department to showcase in November. The department wanted to create research posters to be displayed in Garrison Hall so people who are in the building can look. Regarding my research I mostly worked in the archives of the Briscoe Center of American History and the Nettie Benson Center located in Sid Richardson Hall. We had a research advisor who was graduate student who oversee the work we were producing and guided us through the whole processes.

    Our research advisor was flexible about the schedule that was given to us. When doing research in the archives, one does not what they’ll find so having a flexible was incredibly helpful. Every week I dedicated at least 10 hours of doing research for the internship. I was looking for a topic that was like topics I was passionate about and found a History Honors student who was an activist in the late 70s for Chicana issues at UT. After I collected all the information I needed for the archives, I wrote an article about the work I found and had it published.

    This internship helped me gather a better understanding how important is to have patience’ regarding research. Patience was the key to finding material that was related to the work that I was doing and I was proud of the work I ended up presenting.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History & Government Junior

    A day in the life of a Public History Intern is filled primarily with research and collaboration. The beginning of the day consists of meeting with my fellow interns and our intern leader. We usually meet early in the morning on campus and discuss our weekly/daily goals and progress. We plan where to take our research projects as a team, with some interns choosing to conduct interviews, while others edit or plan trips to the archives. Our intern head, Andrew sets goals we should accomplish by the time of our next meeting such as completing an allotted word count on our research papers or finding documents to photograph.

    Once out of the classroom setting, we are given a large degree of independence on our projects. We pursue documents at the Briscoe Center for American History that are pertinent and interesting to us. We then analyze these documents for exemplary quotes or useful statistics to employ in our papers. A large degree of photographs can also be found which are then used in our articles or research posters. We had to learn how to request files using the system available at the archives which involves box numbers and file numbers.

    Another aspect of our internship work is the conducting of interviews or correspondence. Often helpful personalities or the focal point of our research are still living and accessible. In my case, I conducted an interview with an esteemed UT faculty member. I was tasked with coordinating and conducting an effective and professional interview. I eventually built up a relationship with the subject of my research and he was able to provide me with useful quotes and information in my research that I could not have acquired from the archives alone.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History & Humanities Junior

    A day in the life of a Digital History intern depends on the day, really. We have our weekly meetings on Thursdays from 2-4pm, so let’s start there. At our meetings, my fellow intern, Kevin, and I would discuss the work we had done throughout the week with our advisor. This usually included Kevin’s work making Cerego maps for history department professors, my work on ClioVis timelines or tutorial videos for Cerego and ClioVis, and both of our work on our personal research projects.

    Kevin’s project involved scraping Twitter for the Russian bot tweets during the 2016 election and analyzing how polarity corresponded to popularity using Python. We talked about how to best go about doing that, what problems he was running into, and what to do with the data. My project was to make a video game about the 15th century Italian event, the Pazzi Conspiracy. It involved traditional research, writing a script, and using C# coding with Unity to make the game itself. There was not much they could help me with about coding the game itself, but we talked a lot about why it is important to use new modes of teaching in history, how to conduct my research as if I was writing a microhistory, and how to overcome all the many challenges and setbacks that come with learning new digital skills.

    From the end of our meeting each Thursday until the next one, what Kevin and I worked on was largely self-paced. The internship calls for about ten hours of work per week, so I spread it out across multiple days and alternated tasks so I didn’t get too bogged down. If I was making a ClioVis timeline for an hour or two on Monday afternoon, maybe Tuesday morning I would spend a few hours on building my video game, then another hour on the timeline that afternoon. To get the most out of this internship, you have to be good at time-management and being flexible, both with scheduling and with overcoming unexpected setbacks.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History & Linguistics Senior 

    A typical day in the life of a digital history intern with the University of Texas will vary
    depending on the person but there is one single unifying aspect for each of us: we all have a
    desire to learn. One of the more appealing aspects of being a DH intern is that the internship will be suited to your needs. There will be work required of you but the rest of the time is yours to follow a specific passion. This will manifest itself in the form of a project, one that will
    showcase all of the unique skills that have been picked up along the semester.

    The work required when you first sign on to become an intern involves making maps.
    Using the website Cerego, each DH intern was tasked with creating maps unique to a class in
    order to test geographic literacy in the History department. For example, my main purpose
    serving as a DH intern was to create several maps throughout the semester for an introductory
    history course. This involved using photoshop to clean the maps of unwanted markings/names
    and then highlighting the regions upon which the students were tested upon.

    The second, and more rewarding, aspect was the digital history project which we were
    required to do. My project involved working with a dataset of 3 million Russian troll tweets, and
    with the guidance of my advisor, I was able to learn the necessary skills to do different types of
    analyses on this dataset. This involved working from the ground up in terms of my programming skills, so a lot of time was devoted to learning the programming languages Python and SQL, as well as using Excel for data analysis.

    Overall, my time as a digital history intern has been one of my most rewarding
    experiences at UT Austin and would highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested in the realm of digital humanities or data analysis.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Junior 

    The public history internship at the University of Texas was a little different than a “typical” internship would have been. Rather than learning about an industry and performing work for a business, the public history internship is centered on academic historical research and writing.

    On a typical day, I would be reviewing the primary sources I found in the archives, revising my written work, and maybe adding a little to my writing as well. At the beginning of the internship, I spent much more time in the archives – 2 or 3 hours a day, 2 or 3 days a week – than I did actually writing.  In the archives, I was trawling through history department records and the personal papers of some professors looking for any document that caught my eye. These documents were the ones that formed the basis of my papers. When I had moved on fully to the writing stage, I was working with my co-interns for feedback and submitting my work to my supervisor for suggestions and editing. Then, my work was sent off for publication on the Internet. The last part of the internship focused on preparing for the history department’s 130th anniversary celebration, which consisted of making a research poster for presentation and recording oral history interviews with volunteers from the attendees. I was actually unable to attend the actual event, but I was still involved in the preparations.

    The internship site was nominally an office in Garrison Hall, but we really only met there. Most of my work was performed on my laptop wherever I wanted to be or in the archives in the early stages of the internship.

    Spring 2018

    Position: Digital History Intern, Digital Humanities Project
    Student: History Senior

    There isn’t really a typical day as a Digital History intern. As the semester went on, our responsibilities evolved and a lot of our work was done from home. Initially, we acted as liaisons for professors as they began integrating Cerego into their lower-division classes. Cerego is a quizzing software based on the principles of space repetition as a memory-enhancing tool. A typical week during this time often involved helping professors create map quizzes, upload these quizzes to Canvas and troubleshoot problems as they arose. We would mostly conduct this business over email, then meet weekly to discuss various Cerego problems. A few times a week, I might have had to meet with professors in person to go over problems they struggled to explain over email, but mostly we worked independently. After assignments were made, we also helped professors make necessary edits as they began to get feedback from students. This phase of the internship only lasted about two months. After that, we transitioned to a more research focus. We met weekly to formulate research questions with our graduate student advisor. We did this by really delving into the history and theory of digital humanities as a field. Once we found questions, he guided us as we began to learn to code. We were all pretty woefully lacking in computer science knowledge, but luckily there also wasn’t a whole lot we needed to learn. This phase often included homework and weekly check-ins on our progress. The last phase has been mostly dedicated to writing and really producing a worthwhile paper from our efforts this semester. This included writing the final paper, making research posters and presenting our work. In this way, the last part of this semester has been much more of a straight learning opportunity, under the eye of someone well-versed in the field. Ultimately, the internship required us to be part-IT specialist, part-researcher, but these two differing duties really did come together in a way that served us nicely when making our final projects.

    Position: Digital History Intern
    Student: History Senior

    This past Spring 2018 semester I served as a digital humanities intern in the Department of History at UT. Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field consisting of both historians and digital resource specialists that attempt to create visuals, repositories, digital archives etc to assist in the teaching and preservation of history. As an intern, my responsibility was to help the department carry out it’s faculty concern inspired initiative to increase students’ geographic literacy. This initiative was attractive to me in two ways; as a future educator I felt inspired to help the university fix an issue in students’ knowledge base and as a student trying to broaden my horizons as a professional the potential to pick up new skills was a fantastic opportunity. The internship involved learning a few different new computer skills. The project to increase geographic literacy was executed through the use of an online software called Cerego. I had to learn through practice the ins-and-out of the program including how to design map sets, help professors and TAs embedded the assignments to Canvas. As the semester went on, the interns listened to feedback from professors and students and made adjustments as needed. Meanwhile, the interns got the chance to take lessons with our graduate student supervisor and digital humanities specialist on different areas of interest in how to use technology in individually developed research projects. I decided to base mine around our team project with Cerego and learned mac OS bash language to organize the massive amounts of data from the project and practice data analyzation to say something meaningful about what the students’ did with the map sets. In addition to this, the team had weekly meetings about our projects as a chance to get feedback from each other and help each other learn more skills in the digital humanities field.

    Position: Digital Humanities Intern
    Student: History Junior

    The UT Digital History Project is an excellent way for the ambitious history student to hone his or her technological skills. Under the guidance of Andrew Akhlaghi, PhD candidate and local digital history guru, I spent the first part of my semester implementing maps into a software program called Cerego (conceptually like Quizlet, but with more options for study). These maps were marked in areas which prompted students to identify features such as country/territorial borders, notable cities, rivers, battle sites, etc. Cerego was used this semester for the first time in several UT history undergraduate classrooms as a supplement to the usual course content. It has been noted by several faculty members that their students lack geographical knowledge, and Cerego was enlisted to remedy that problem. How effective it actually ended up being for students, I do not know. One of the two other interns I worked alongside focused on that for her digital history project, so she is the expert for that sort of data.

    This brings me to the second part of the internship, which I spent the remainder of my semester on, which was my own individualized digital history project. It was an opportunity to flex my newly discovered Python programming muscle, which Andrew helped us develop by giving us lessons, resources, and guidance. He also informed us that we would be presenting the results of our project at the Longhorn Research Bazaar. This at first seemed insurmountably daunting, but I am now glad for the experience. Not only did I learn to use big data as another perspective (a computer’s perspective) as a part of the conversation in interpreting history, but I was made aware of problems with transparency in how data is collected when looking at other, published research in my area of interest.

    Then given the opportunity to present at the research bazaar, I was pleasantly surprised to find that brilliant faculty members and grad students seemed to be as enthusiastic about my research as I was. Overall, it was a wonderful experience which I highly recommend. Through the UT Digital History Project, I learned about education from the educator’s perspective. I was able to see what goes into planning for courses, and the kinds of factors professors consider when determining how to teach the subject matter to their students. I learned of their perception of geographical deficiency among students, ironically a product of technology, which we used technology to solve.

  • Baylor College of Medicine

    Fall 2021

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Psychology

    I’m a research assistant for a lab in the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). I landed this internship primarily through networking. While working as an intern for the VA Medical Center over the summer, I met a college graduate who worked partly for the VA and partly for BCM. She introduced me to her principal investigator, and after speaking with him, I inquired about internship opportunities. I primarily work on CONN brain imaging work. I’m currently learning how to use the software, practicing with scans they have, and will soon be helping them collect data from new scans. I greatly admire the commitment and dedication to research everyone in the lab holds -- so much so that it’s my favorite part of being in the lab!

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  • MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

    Summer 2021

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Economics

    This summer, I worked at the Global Office of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), as part of the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP). This research center is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is affiliated with MIT. I found about this internship on the program’s website as I was looking for opportunities available for international students. This program is meant for minority and first-generation students who are interested in pursuing a research career. Applicants choose a specific MIT professor in any field to work with throughout the summer. Students can choose any faculty member among the five schools at MIT: School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Sloan School of Management, and School of Science. In my case, I ranked three professors, choosing Dr. Ben Olken as the first one, and I ended up getting paired with my first choice. Besides being an economics professor, he is the director of J-PAL, which is why I did my internship at this lab.

    I joined the J-PAL’s policy and research teams during my time in Cambridge. As part of the first one, I detected personally identifiable information (PII) in a replication package from an intervention in India meant to understand how to increase access to welfare programs. Additionally, I worked on an independent project in which I analyzed data on randomized controlled trials (RCT) data downloads from J-PAL’s data repository. I did an exploratory analysis to understand what makes a dataset popular and presented the results in the program’s virtual poster session. In the policy team, I classified research projects by the quality of their cost data so that other policy associates could use this information to do cost-effectiveness analysis on them.

    My favorite thing about MSRP was its diversity. I interacted with other motivated students who are genuinely passionate about their research and want to pursue a graduate degree in their field. I learned so much from them, and we created long-lasting connections with each other. Besides, the mentorship aspect of the program is impressive, as we had weekly meetings with our mentors, who are graduate students at MIT who previously did MSRP when they were undergraduates. Learning from their advice was extremely valuable, as they are currently experiencing what we would like to do in the future. We received feedback on how to write statements of purpose, research proposals, abstracts, and research posters, which are some of the requirements for graduate school applications. I will apply what I learned when applying for a Ph.D. in economics two years from now.

    In regards to my experience in J-PAL, my favorite thing was that I contributed to real projects that are valuable for the research center. I worked with real data from past randomized experiments, which was pretty exciting. I also value the mentorship part of J-PAL, as I had weekly meetings with my supervisor and with another research associate. They even helped me in the process of figuring out a topic for my senior thesis, which I am currently writing. Finally, I met people from the other branches, and everyone was friendly and willing to help. It is fascinating how J-PAL connects research and policy by finding answers to questions on critical matters that affect the world and doing policy outreach on these results. I would love to go back and work for a couple of years at this research center before going to graduate school.

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  • National Student Leadership Conference

    Summer 2017

    Position: Business and Entrepreneurship Assistant Team Advisor
    Student: Economics Freshman

    During this last month of July, I worked as an Assistant Team Advisor at the National Student Leadership Conference (NSLC), at Yale University. This conference is held throughout 10 different prestigious universities throughout the nations, and it specializes in more than 20 different fields that range from STEM to business to performance arts and more. The mission of the conference is to help high school students explore career options and have an insight into the field of the program they chose.

    As an Assistant Team Advisor, I had a varied range of responsibilities. The main responsibility I was in charge of was the group of students I guided side by side with a Team Advisor throughout the 9-day program on site. As an Assistant Team Advisor, it was my job to assist the Team Advisor in meetings and with the different simulations our students had to go through. However, the opportunity to do more was always present, and I always tried to look for one. The students had two different simulations: a product pitch for a product the students had to come up with and prepare in the span of 7 days, and a multinational corporation facing different situations in the span of a fiscal year. It was in these simulations that I was able to help my students the most, as I used the knowledge that I had gained in my different classes to guide them through the decisions they had to make as a team.

    My second biggest responsibility was a class I was in charge of preparing and teaching. As I came to site for the second half of the summer, I was paired with another Team Advisor to teach a previously prepared class on International Business. This was part of a series of lectures prepared by the staff on different topics such as Marketing, Business & Las, Resumé Building & Interview Skills, and Leadership.

    Our days were long and full of work, which made keeping my normal routine harder that I expected. Our responsibilities would usually begin around 8:30 AM with activities throughout the day that would go on until 10:15 PM, with breaks for lunch and dinner in between. After that, we’d have responsibilities as RAs to do RA checks in every room at 11 PM; finally, we’d end the day with a logistics meeting that would usually go on until 11:45 PM.

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  • Princeton University

    Spring 2021

    Position: Research Assistant 
    Student: Economics and Mathematics Junior

    This spring semester, I have been working as a research assistant to Prof. Christopher Neilson, an applied microeconomist at Princeton University. His research focuses on the study of public policies and regulation in education markets. I found this position after attending a virtual conference called ASHE Hispanic Pre-Doctoral Pipeline Conference, which was meant to connect Hispanic students with prominent pre-doc hiring institutions. The organizers of this event sent an email regarding this internship opportunity, which I became interested in. As part of my duties, I have helped Prof. Neilson advance his research documenting the prevalence of centralized admission systems in education markets throughout the world. I have been updating a spreadsheet on the status of the admission system per education level (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of each one of the countries. I have also written descriptive paragraphs for some of them, which will be later used to update the project’s website. My favorite thing about this internship experience is the support and mentorship I have received from my supervisor and the research team. I have gained a better understanding of predoctoral fellowships and graduate school by talking with other people at Princeton. This has helped me confirm my desire to pursue a research career in economics. I’m excited about starting to apply to predoctoral fellowships next semester!

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  • Project SEED at UT Austin

    Fall 2020

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Geography and Sustainability Studies Senior

    Project SEED operates under the direction of ​Dr. Su Yeong Kim, a faculty member in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. This is a research study on Mexican American children and families, with the goal of understanding how children who translate between Spanish and English for their English-limited speaking parents are affected in the areas of: children’s health, academic development and socio-emotional development. I came across a listing for this research project on Handshake.

    My position entails working as a research assistant, specifically as an office RA. I help schedule trainings for field RAs, who actually go and interact with the families involved in the study. I coordinate the trainings for both ‘health measurements’ and ‘computer task’ activities. These are duties that the field RAs must know how to do when they go to the families’ homes and collect data.

    My favorite thing about this internship has been that Dr. Kim really makes an effort to get to know everyone and teach us what the research is all about. She helps us understand how each of our jobs are valuable to the overall project and how advanced academic research really works. I feel like I know a lot more now about what goes on behind the scenes of large-scale projects like this.

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  • University Leadership Network

    Spring 2016 

    Position: Research Intern
    Student: Economics Senior
    The internship was mostly self-paced, with weekly mentor meetings. It’s important to note that this wasn’t a typical internship. I pitched the idea to ULN, and they’re new and this hasn’t been done before, so it isn’t a standard situation. It was mostly me pursuing research on a topic of interest- the lack of tutoring for Economics upper division courses. I would ask my mentor for advice on how to best word my emails and general professional communication, but it was mostly self-driven.

    My site is with the University Leadership Network, which is a scholarship organization that works with and within UT. The scholarships they offer- $5,000 per year, for all four years- go to incoming freshman in need of financial aid and with good grades. The scholarship is given with the caveat of certain requirements that have to be met by the student: going to weekly meetings their freshman year, getting an internship their sophomore and junior year, and so on. They (ULN) operate within the larger industry framework of education by helping students pay for higher education. Less related are the industries of online business and educational video, although ULN does encourage their students to be entrepreneurial in general, and ULN puts up the talks it has online for their students to view.

  • UT Austin Athletics

    Spring 2017

    Position: Student Assistant
    Student: Sociology Senior

    During the off-season, this will be the most relaxed time of the school year. Since I work with other girls, I only work a couple hours a day. Most of my day is tracking down receipts for our expense reports, or making sure all the travel plans for the coaches are verified. Every day, I will be in the Athletic Directors office getting a signature for paperwork, or answering the phones. Usually during the office season, the coaches are out recruiting, so there will be days when the office is quiet, but normally you will begin working on summer camp activities like organizing the medical forms for the campers and making sure we have all our staff for the camp. During the season, you will be required to attend most if not all the home games. My job is to make sure all our recruits and parents have saved seats in the student section and accommodate them however I can. The coaches will be busy with the game, so you will be the first line of contact. Besides the game, you will oversee the ticketing for our high school coaches in Texas and any special guests. It’s important to keep a positive and professional attitude in the office as our phones are busy during the season from our supporters. During the summer, mainly in June, you will be working with our Summer Camp, the main job. It will be your job to help plan and execute the entire camps during the summer. You will be present to answer all questions that parents have, make sure food is available, and make sure all the campers’ medical forms are in file before they can play at UT. You will also have to deal with payment, scheduling, and any other projects associated with the camps itself.

  • UT Austin Dell Medical School

    Spring 2017  

    Position: Student Development Assistant
    Student: Sociology Senior 

    This internship has taught me a great deal overall about what an office environment looks like - it has also taught me a few things about myself. Through this internship, I’ve been able to gain a better understanding of the ways people in an office as large as Dell Medical School interact with each other. There are a lot of small things, like chatting with strangers at the coffee machines that I have now become a lot more familiar and comfortable with since joining the team at Dell Med. I have also learned some concrete skills, such as how to write more professional emails and some of the better secrets to expertly navigating an excel document. I have learned how to stay motivated and focused even in a loud, construction filled work site. On a more personal level, this internship has taught me how much I value co-worker interactions. I am generally a very introverted individual, but this job has shown me that I am not quite as content sticking to myself as I once thought. When I was put on projects that required hours of time with just me and the computer, I was not a very happy worker, and really wished I was working on something that required interaction with others. I think that having the experience of really disliking that part of my job will help me know better what to look for in future jobs. I have also learned, partly through this internship experience, and partly through my classes this semester, that I am less interested in working in development than I first thought. Since starting this internship I have accepted a position in a Management graduate program, and am really looking forward to that. Even though I’ve come away less interested in development than when I first started, I think having the experience and learning about that disinterest is will be very valuable to me as I head into grad school, and eventually the workforce. 

  • UT Austin - Public Safety Commission Coding Project

    Summer 2016 

    Position: Public Safety Commission Coding Project
    Student: Sociology Senior

    A typical day in the life as an intern, working on Becky Pettit’s Public Safety Commission Project, consisted of working on the computer lab in the College of Liberal Arts building or at home using your own personal computer. Having the liberty to work from home during your own time was the best part since I could go home after a long day of school to work on it. My duties, as an intern, included analyzing, coding and transcribing public videos of the Public Safety Commission meetings held each month in Austin. 

    I usually worked right after school, Monday through Friday for an hour or so each day in order to complete my assigned work. The first thing I had to do was to pick a Public Safety Commission meeting that I wanted to transcribe. Transcribing is the process of converting recordings of social or communicative human interaction into written text. Writing down of what was said is only part of the transcription task, it also involves attending to how things were said and the time they said it. The transcription then becomes the actual data used for further analysis. Transcribing is a relative simple task but it takes hours to finish transcribing multiple recordings.

    After transcribing the recording comes the analytical process of coding the qualitative data. Coding the transcription means to assign categories to the data or information into a form understandable by computer software. The classification of information is an important step in the preparation of data for computer processing with statistical software.

    In conclusion, working as an intern for Becky Pettit was an amazing opportunity to get personal insight of what it takes to work in the field of research. This opportunity has also strengthened my interest in pursuing graduate school.

  • UT OnRamps

    Spring 2017  

    Position: Project Management Innovative Fellow
    Student: Sociology/Plan I Honors Junior 

    A typical day at OnRamps can vary greatly! I’ll run through some common meetings and tasks that I complete in a day. 

    I worked about 15hrs per week at OnRamps (sometimes more or less depending on my school schedule). I would work full days on Mondays and Wednesdays. OnRamps is on Guadalupe St., so I would usually take the 40 Acres Bus to Walter Webber and take the elevator up to the 4th floor. The OnRamps staff is composed of about 30 people, so I’ll say “Hi” to whoever I see in the office. At 9:30am, there’s a huddle meeting for about 20 minutes where the staff talks about about what there is “to do” what’s “being done” and what’s “done”. We post our tasks on a sticky note board and give each other general updates.

    From there, I’d usually log onto my OnRamps computer and check my email and calendar. Typically, I’m part of some ongoing projects that require me to use Smartsheet or edit documents in Box. Then, at 11am (only on Wednesdays) there’s a big staff meeting downstairs. The program director, Julie, leads the meeting. We do some icebreakers and major developments/changes are announced.

    After that meeting I eat lunch at my desk or go out for a short lunch break. Once a week I’ll meet with my supervisor around 3pm in the afternoon for a 30 minute check-in regarding the projects I’m a part of. After that, I usually try to finish the most urgent tasks I have for my projects. Then I make a to-do list of what needs to be accomplished when I come in the next day. 

  • The University of Texas at Austin- Athletics 

    Spring 2017

    Position: Student Assistant
    Student: Sociology Senior

    During the off-season, this will be the most relaxed time of the school year. Since I work with other girls, I only work a couple hours a day. Most of my day is tracking down receipts for our expense reports, or making sure all the travel plans for the coaches are verified. Every day, I will be in the Athletic Directors office getting a signature for paperwork, or answering the phones. Usually during the office season, the coaches are out recruiting, so there will be days when the office is quiet, but normally you will begin working on summer camp activities like organizing the medical forms for the campers and making sure we have all our staff for the camp. During the season, you will be required to attend most if not all the home games. My job is to make sure all our recruits and parents have saved seats in the student section and accommodate them however I can. The coaches will be busy with the game, so you will be the first line of contact. Besides the game, you will oversee the ticketing for our high school coaches in Texas and any special guests. It’s important to keep a positive and professional attitude in the office as our phones are busy during the season from our supporters. During the summer, mainly in June, you will be working with our Summer Camp, the main job. It will be your job to help plan and execute the entire camps during the summer. You will be present to answer all questions that parents have, make sure food is available, and make sure all the campers’ medical forms are in file before they can play at UT. You will also have to deal with payment, scheduling, and any other projects associated with the camps itself.

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  • The University of Texas at Austin- Clark Center for Australian & New Zealand Studies

    Spring 2023

    Position: Clark Scholar 
    Student: History and Government Senior 

    I have been serving as the Clark Scholar for the Clark Center since the beginning of Fall 2021. This internship came in connection with my Human Rights and World Politics professor Dr. Rhonda Evans, who is the director of the Center. I was one of her research interns in Spring 2022 at the Center and offered me the Clark Scholar role for my senior year. The research position allows me to explore my personal research interests and support the Center’s existing platform of analysis, collaborative work, and professional experience. This semester, I am supporting the postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Andrew Gibbons, in his studies of media and public policy. I read a lot of news articles about the Australian Senate, to be blunt. The self-starting nature of my role is what I enjoy the most, but I always have to be on top of my work. 

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  • The University of Texas at Austin- Dell Medical School

    Spring 2017  

    Position: Student Development Assistant
    Student: Sociology Senior 

    This internship has taught me a great deal overall about what an office environment looks like - it has also taught me a few things about myself. Through this internship, I’ve been able to gain a better understanding of the ways people in an office as large as Dell Medical School interact with each other. There are a lot of small things, like chatting with strangers at the coffee machines that I have now become a lot more familiar and comfortable with since joining the team at Dell Med. I have also learned some concrete skills, such as how to write more professional emails and some of the better secrets to expertly navigating an excel document. I have learned how to stay motivated and focused even in a loud, construction filled work site. On a more personal level, this internship has taught me how much I value co-worker interactions. I am generally a very introverted individual, but this job has shown me that I am not quite as content sticking to myself as I once thought. When I was put on projects that required hours of time with just me and the computer, I was not a very happy worker, and really wished I was working on something that required interaction with others. I think that having the experience of really disliking that part of my job will help me know better what to look for in future jobs. I have also learned, partly through this internship experience, and partly through my classes this semester, that I am less interested in working in development than I first thought. Since starting this internship I have accepted a position in a Management graduate program, and am really looking forward to that. Even though I’ve come away less interested in development than when I first started, I think having the experience and learning about that disinterest is will be very valuable to me as I head into grad school, and eventually the workforce. 

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  • The University of Texas at Austin - History Department

    Fall 2018

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Senior

    During this last semester I participated in the Public History internship under the supervision of Dr. Julie Hardwick and Andrew Akhlaghi. I was working directly for the History Department of the University of Texas to create a project for the 130th anniversary celebration.

    I was not the only student in the internship, there were 4 of us total all working on different projects to present at the 130th anniversary party. I was assigned the project of creating a timeline of the History Department. Part of my task was to use a software called ClioVis, a timeline software developed by a professor in the department. We were given a fair amount of free reign in deciding what to do our project on. Andrew had given us a few suggestions but was very open to letting us explore whatever we were interested in.

    Every week we met with Andrew as a group to discuss our individual projects, read and critique each other's projects, and discuss the ins and outs of the anniversary party and what our roles would be. We also met with Andrew one on one every week to discuss our personal projects more in depth. Each of the meetings lasted about an hour (like a normal class). On our own time, we then spent hours and hours every week either in the archive centers or interviewing people that could help us gather information to complete our projects.

    The day of the celebration we met up in a room in Garrison at 9 am and stayed there until the end of the celebration (4pm) presenting our projects. There were many events going on that day and people weaved in and out of various rooms in the building, all of them held research, panels, faculty led discussions, interviews, or tours of campus and the archival center. When someone entered our room and walked up to our poster or presentation that was when we presented our semester's worth of work.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Senior

    For the past semester I have been interning with the History Department as a Public History intern. The purpose of this internship was for the 130th anniversary of the department. As interns were to research history about the history department to showcase in November. The department wanted to create research posters to be displayed in Garrison Hall so people who are in the building can look. Regarding my research I mostly worked in the archives of the Briscoe Center of American History and the Nettie Benson Center located in Sid Richardson Hall. We had a research advisor who was graduate student who oversee the work we were producing and guided us through the whole processes.

    Our research advisor was flexible about the schedule that was given to us. When doing research in the archives, one does not what they’ll find so having a flexible was incredibly helpful. Every week I dedicated at least 10 hours of doing research for the internship. I was looking for a topic that was like topics I was passionate about and found a History Honors student who was an activist in the late 70s for Chicana issues at UT. After I collected all the information I needed for the archives, I wrote an article about the work I found and had it published.

    This internship helped me gather a better understanding how important is to have patience’ regarding research. Patience was the key to finding material that was related to the work that I was doing and I was proud of the work I ended up presenting.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History and Government Junior

    A day in the life of a Public History Intern is filled primarily with research and collaboration. The beginning of the day consists of meeting with my fellow interns and our intern leader. We usually meet early in the morning on campus and discuss our weekly/daily goals and progress. We plan where to take our research projects as a team, with some interns choosing to conduct interviews, while others edit or plan trips to the archives. Our intern head, Andrew sets goals we should accomplish by the time of our next meeting such as completing an allotted word count on our research papers or finding documents to photograph.

    Once out of the classroom setting, we are given a large degree of independence on our projects. We pursue documents at the Briscoe Center for American History that are pertinent and interesting to us. We then analyze these documents for exemplary quotes or useful statistics to employ in our papers. A large degree of photographs can also be found which are then used in our articles or research posters. We had to learn how to request files using the system available at the archives which involves box numbers and file numbers.

    Another aspect of our internship work is the conducting of interviews or correspondence. Often helpful personalities or the focal point of our research are still living and accessible. In my case, I conducted an interview with an esteemed UT faculty member. I was tasked with coordinating and conducting an effective and professional interview. I eventually built up a relationship with the subject of my research and he was able to provide me with useful quotes and information in my research that I could not have acquired from the archives alone.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History and Humanities Junior

    A day in the life of a Digital History intern depends on the day, really. We have our weekly meetings on Thursdays from 2-4pm, so let’s start there. At our meetings, my fellow intern, Kevin, and I would discuss the work we had done throughout the week with our advisor. This usually included Kevin’s work making Cerego maps for history department professors, my work on ClioVis timelines or tutorial videos for Cerego and ClioVis, and both of our work on our personal research projects.

    Kevin’s project involved scraping Twitter for the Russian bot tweets during the 2016 election and analyzing how polarity corresponded to popularity using Python. We talked about how to best go about doing that, what problems he was running into, and what to do with the data. My project was to make a video game about the 15th century Italian event, the Pazzi Conspiracy. It involved traditional research, writing a script, and using C# coding with Unity to make the game itself. There was not much they could help me with about coding the game itself, but we talked a lot about why it is important to use new modes of teaching in history, how to conduct my research as if I was writing a microhistory, and how to overcome all the many challenges and setbacks that come with learning new digital skills.

    From the end of our meeting each Thursday until the next one, what Kevin and I worked on was largely self-paced. The internship calls for about ten hours of work per week, so I spread it out across multiple days and alternated tasks so I didn’t get too bogged down. If I was making a ClioVis timeline for an hour or two on Monday afternoon, maybe Tuesday morning I would spend a few hours on building my video game, then another hour on the timeline that afternoon. To get the most out of this internship, you have to be good at time-management and being flexible, both with scheduling and with overcoming unexpected setbacks.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History and Linguistics Senior 

    A typical day in the life of a digital history intern with the University of Texas will vary
    depending on the person but there is one single unifying aspect for each of us: we all have a
    desire to learn. One of the more appealing aspects of being a DH intern is that the internship will be suited to your needs. There will be work required of you but the rest of the time is yours to follow a specific passion. This will manifest itself in the form of a project, one that will
    showcase all of the unique skills that have been picked up along the semester.

    The work required when you first sign on to become an intern involves making maps.
    Using the website Cerego, each DH intern was tasked with creating maps unique to a class in
    order to test geographic literacy in the History department. For example, my main purpose
    serving as a DH intern was to create several maps throughout the semester for an introductory
    history course. This involved using photoshop to clean the maps of unwanted markings/names
    and then highlighting the regions upon which the students were tested upon.

    The second, and more rewarding, aspect was the digital history project which we were
    required to do. My project involved working with a dataset of 3 million Russian troll tweets, and
    with the guidance of my advisor, I was able to learn the necessary skills to do different types of
    analyses on this dataset. This involved working from the ground up in terms of my programming skills, so a lot of time was devoted to learning the programming languages Python and SQL, as well as using Excel for data analysis.

    Overall, my time as a digital history intern has been one of my most rewarding
    experiences at UT Austin and would highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested in the realm of digital humanities or data analysis.

    Position: Digital Humanities Project Intern
    Student: History Junior 

    The public history internship at the University of Texas was a little different than a “typical” internship would have been. Rather than learning about an industry and performing work for a business, the public history internship is centered on academic historical research and writing.

    On a typical day, I would be reviewing the primary sources I found in the archives, revising my written work, and maybe adding a little to my writing as well. At the beginning of the internship, I spent much more time in the archives – 2 or 3 hours a day, 2 or 3 days a week – than I did actually writing.  In the archives, I was trawling through history department records and the personal papers of some professors looking for any document that caught my eye. These documents were the ones that formed the basis of my papers. When I had moved on fully to the writing stage, I was working with my co-interns for feedback and submitting my work to my supervisor for suggestions and editing. Then, my work was sent off for publication on the Internet. The last part of the internship focused on preparing for the history department’s 130th anniversary celebration, which consisted of making a research poster for presentation and recording oral history interviews with volunteers from the attendees. I was actually unable to attend the actual event, but I was still involved in the preparations.

    The internship site was nominally an office in Garrison Hall, but we really only met there. Most of my work was performed on my laptop wherever I wanted to be or in the archives in the early stages of the internship.

    Spring 2018

    Position: Digital History Intern, Digital Humanities Project
    Student: History Senior

    There isn’t really a typical day as a Digital History intern. As the semester went on, our responsibilities evolved and a lot of our work was done from home. Initially, we acted as liaisons for professors as they began integrating Cerego into their lower-division classes. Cerego is a quizzing software based on the principles of space repetition as a memory-enhancing tool. A typical week during this time often involved helping professors create map quizzes, upload these quizzes to Canvas and troubleshoot problems as they arose. We would mostly conduct this business over email, then meet weekly to discuss various Cerego problems. A few times a week, I might have had to meet with professors in person to go over problems they struggled to explain over email, but mostly we worked independently. After assignments were made, we also helped professors make necessary edits as they began to get feedback from students. This phase of the internship only lasted about two months. After that, we transitioned to a more research focus. We met weekly to formulate research questions with our graduate student advisor. We did this by really delving into the history and theory of digital humanities as a field. Once we found questions, he guided us as we began to learn to code. We were all pretty woefully lacking in computer science knowledge, but luckily there also wasn’t a whole lot we needed to learn. This phase often included homework and weekly check-ins on our progress. The last phase has been mostly dedicated to writing and really producing a worthwhile paper from our efforts this semester. This included writing the final paper, making research posters and presenting our work. In this way, the last part of this semester has been much more of a straight learning opportunity, under the eye of someone well-versed in the field. Ultimately, the internship required us to be part-IT specialist, part-researcher, but these two differing duties really did come together in a way that served us nicely when making our final projects.

    Position: Digital History Intern
    Student: History Senior

    This past Spring 2018 semester I served as a digital humanities intern in the Department of History at UT. Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field consisting of both historians and digital resource specialists that attempt to create visuals, repositories, digital archives etc to assist in the teaching and preservation of history. As an intern, my responsibility was to help the department carry out it’s faculty concern inspired initiative to increase students’ geographic literacy. This initiative was attractive to me in two ways; as a future educator I felt inspired to help the university fix an issue in students’ knowledge base and as a student trying to broaden my horizons as a professional the potential to pick up new skills was a fantastic opportunity. The internship involved learning a few different new computer skills. The project to increase geographic literacy was executed through the use of an online software called Cerego. I had to learn through practice the ins-and-out of the program including how to design map sets, help professors and TAs embedded the assignments to Canvas. As the semester went on, the interns listened to feedback from professors and students and made adjustments as needed. Meanwhile, the interns got the chance to take lessons with our graduate student supervisor and digital humanities specialist on different areas of interest in how to use technology in individually developed research projects. I decided to base mine around our team project with Cerego and learned mac OS bash language to organize the massive amounts of data from the project and practice data analyzation to say something meaningful about what the students’ did with the map sets. In addition to this, the team had weekly meetings about our projects as a chance to get feedback from each other and help each other learn more skills in the digital humanities field.

    Position: Digital Humanities Intern
    Student: History Junior

    The UT Digital History Project is an excellent way for the ambitious history student to hone his or her technological skills. Under the guidance of Andrew Akhlaghi, PhD candidate and local digital history guru, I spent the first part of my semester implementing maps into a software program called Cerego (conceptually like Quizlet, but with more options for study). These maps were marked in areas which prompted students to identify features such as country/territorial borders, notable cities, rivers, battle sites, etc. Cerego was used this semester for the first time in several UT history undergraduate classrooms as a supplement to the usual course content. It has been noted by several faculty members that their students lack geographical knowledge, and Cerego was enlisted to remedy that problem. How effective it actually ended up being for students, I do not know. One of the two other interns I worked alongside focused on that for her digital history project, so she is the expert for that sort of data.

    This brings me to the second part of the internship, which I spent the remainder of my semester on, which was my own individualized digital history project. It was an opportunity to flex my newly discovered Python programming muscle, which Andrew helped us develop by giving us lessons, resources, and guidance. He also informed us that we would be presenting the results of our project at the Longhorn Research Bazaar. This at first seemed insurmountably daunting, but I am now glad for the experience. Not only did I learn to use big data as another perspective (a computer’s perspective) as a part of the conversation in interpreting history, but I was made aware of problems with transparency in how data is collected when looking at other, published research in my area of interest.

    Then given the opportunity to present at the research bazaar, I was pleasantly surprised to find that brilliant faculty members and grad students seemed to be as enthusiastic about my research as I was. Overall, it was a wonderful experience which I highly recommend. Through the UT Digital History Project, I learned about education from the educator’s perspective. I was able to see what goes into planning for courses, and the kinds of factors professors consider when determining how to teach the subject matter to their students. I learned of their perception of geographical deficiency among students, ironically a product of technology, which we used technology to solve.

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  • The University of Texas at Austin- Initiative for Digital Humanities, Humanities Institute

    Spring 2023

    Position: Undergraduate Researcher and Intern 
    Student: Philosophy and History Junior

    The Initiative for Digital Humanities (IDH) is under the Humanities Institute, the institutional site for humanities-centered research at UT to find its voice, whether in scholarly venues or in public forums. I found this internship opportunity through the IDH official discord. My supervisor, Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, posted an announcement about the possible research experience, and I sent her a private message and it went on from there!

    As an intern and undergraduate researcher working on the AudiAnnotate project, I worked heavily with audiovisual artifacts. I assisted the AWE Team in creating an interactive workshop and project for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO) 2023 International Conference. This involved using Audacity, an open-source digital audio editing software, to complete annotations of audio recordings, and the AudiAnnotate Workflow to help researchers creating digital editions, including Vera Estrada Burrows’s project, Radio Venceremos, The Rebel’s Radio Station, which involves annotating and contextualizing recordings held at UT Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection from Radio Venceremos (“Radio We Will Overcome”), a popular, clandestine radio station that the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) created to broadcast news and analysis from the mountains of Morazán, El Salvador during the eleven year Salvadoran Civil War (1981-1992). I also created my own project, A Digital Florilegium, that evaluates the authenticity of digital art both in art that was intentionally made through digital means like film or art that was digitized in order to preserve or make it accessible. 

    My favorite part of this internship was that it allowed me to engage with the technical side of projects in the digital humanities while also being able to be very specific with my interests. This project, overall, gave me a lot of insight into the realm and horrors of academic research in the humanities, the bright future of how digital humanities can save it, and the specific motivation for me to continue research in aesthetics and philosophy of art.

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  • The University of Texas at Austin- JapanLab

    Spring 2023

    Position: Crafting Yokohama Intern
    Student: History Freshman

    The organization that I’m interning for is UT JapanLab, which seeks to create projects that showcase specific topics from Japanese history through a digital medium. I was introduced to JapanLab by one of my professors in a class on East Asian History, and later attended a showcase of some of their previous work. The specific project I’m working on now is called “Crafting Yokohama,” which seeks to create a 3D digital recreation of the port-city of Yokohama as it was in the 1880s. For this project, I’ve had to both consult historical documents—such as photos, woodblock prints, travelogs, books, maps—as well as learn to model 3D objects in Autodesk Maya. Our team consists of six interns and two mentors who assist us with research and 3D modeling. We meet around 1-2 times a week to discuss and plan while most of the actual work we perform individually or in small groups. My favorite thing about the internship is that I’ve been able to combine my love for history and digital software while meeting people with interests that I share. I’ve really enjoyed it!

    Position: Digital Humanities Intern
    Student: History Sophomore

     JapanLab is a research lab at UT dedicated to producing educational content on Japanese history and culture through video games. I found this internship through the History Department’s newsletter, though my cohort consisted of students majoring in Japanese, computer science, and other disciplines. As a Digital Humanities Intern, I was responsible for researching academic literature, newspapers, and photographs to contextualize propaganda from a 1937 Japanese sugoroku board game. Humanities students are responsible for constructing the narrative of the game, which the computer science team then digitalizes to be played in classrooms across the world. This internship has been very flexible with my schedule and gave me a lot of creative freedom to delve into my own interests as I explored the source material. Furthermore, I’m ecstatic that we will eventually have a finished product that anyone with Internet access can use to learn about the Japanese empire, which has been severely neglected in Western education.

    Position: Playing at Empire: Imperial Japan through Sugoroku Intern
    Student: East Asian Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures Senior

    The organization I intern for is UT JapanLab. JapanLab is a UT affiliated organization whose aim is to create projects related to Japanese language, history, and culture that are both accurate and accessible. I found out about this internship through announcements from my Asian Studies and Japanese professors. Given the nature of JapanLab, the internship is much more of a collaborative research project. My group was tasked with digitizing a board game from 1930s wartime Japan to create something that is historically accurate while also engaging to players. My job on the narrative side of the project was to translate the Japanese text and research the historical context of the tiles found on the game board. It was both challenging and fun to translate older Japanese. I highly recommend JapanLab to anyone interested in anything related to Japan, but especially to Asian Studies and Japanese majors!

    Position: Undergraduate Intern, “Crafting Yokohama” Project
    Student: Plan II and Neuroscience Freshman

    This spring, I have had the fortune of interning at the UT JapanLab as a member of the “Crafting Yokohama” team. I found out about the internship through an announcement from Texas Student Digital Humanities, and I was able to learn more about the lab through the end-of-semester JapanLab Expo. Each semester, JapanLab assembles groups of undergraduate students to produce interactive digital resources regarding Japanese history. JapanLab’s past projects have included a digital version of a traditional Japanese board game, a choose-your-own-adventure game, and a virtual story map. My team, the “Crafting Yokohama” project, was assembled in order to create 3D models of two major areas in the 19th-century treaty port of Yokohama. These models will be produced in Autodesk Maya and Unity and presented to the public at our April VisLab expo. To achieve this goal, we have analyzed historical images from Japanese archives, modeled components of each scene, and applied post-processing effects to the scenes. Each week, we spend about 5-10 hours conducting full group and small group meetings, attending 3D modeling tutorials, and working remotely. My favorite aspect of this project has been learning more about new academic disciplines—namely, digital humanities and qualitative historical research. Working with our two wonderful supervisors (Dr. Jessa Dahl and Dr. Tom Chandler) and learning from their expertise in these two fields has been an amazing opportunity, and I am excited to explore the new research interests I have gained from this experience.

    Position: Lead Programming Intern - Kenmu Transformation
    Student: Classical Languages and Math Sophomore

    JapanLab is a research organization on campus that aims to make educational digital humanities content to spread knowledge about Japanese culture and history. I found this organization and this internship from the student organization, Texas Student Digital Humanities. Within this organization, I work with a group developing a visual novel about the Kenmu Transformation, a political event that happened in the 1330s. I program the logic for the game, as well as asset-storing systems and parts of the GUI. I was also involved in the initial historical research for the game’s narrative. My favorite part of this internship is how it opened my eyes to the field of digital humanities, which is now one of my top choices for careers that I want to pursue. I’m able to combine my passion for history with my programming skills, which is not a very common opportunity. I’m grateful for the people I’ve met and the knowledge I’ve gained this semester, and I hope to continue working with this group in the future. Shout out to Dr. Megan Gilbert and Haley Price for their amazing guidance!

    Position: Crafting Yokohama Project Digital Humanities Intern
    Student: Sociology Junior

    JapanLab offers semester-long digital humanities internships for UT students with the goal of creating educational materials about Japan. There are a wide range of project types, and different formats on different Japanese history topics are offered every semester. I found this internship through the Liberal Arts Honors newsletter. I am working on the Crafting Yokohama Project, and my team is making 3D models of various areas of 19th-century Yokohama, Japan in Unity3D and Autodesk Maya. I am primarily working on the historical side of things, so I have been sorting through old photographs to use as references for the models and preparing background information about Yokohama that will go on the JapanLab website. My favorite part of the internship has been looking through the old photos of Yokohama. I am having a lot of fun with the historical research because I have learned a lot about historical photography, which is something I probably wouldn’t have looked into otherwise.

    Position: Lead Script Writer
    Student: International Relations and Global Studies Senior

    My experience interning this semester for the JapanLab Kenmu Restoration project has been very eye-opening for me. I found this internship from a flier handed out by my literature professor in the Fall, and being accepted by the coordinators was an extremely rewarding experience. Most of my time with the organization at the beginning of the semester was spent compiling my own research about a specific time period in history, which taught me invaluable lessons about the proper academic methods of studying bodies of text. Later in the semester was spent coordinating with my fellow interns to create a digital project. This coordination is probably my favorite thing so far about being a part of the JapanLab team. Each of us is an essential part of a greater whole, and with each rough draft it is plain to see how we each contributed equal amounts to something we can all be proud of.

    Position: Undergraduate Research Assistant (UX/UI Design)
    Student: Advertising and Asian Cultures and Languages Junior

     JapanLab is a research project within the Asian Studies department that focuses on creating immersive experiences to depict Japanese history and culture. I first found out about it through friends that were in the program in one of my Japanese classes, and after applying, I was assigned the role of UX/UI design lead for our goal of creating a visual novel based off 14th century Japanese history. The first month of the project consisted of studying the history and discussing it with my group to ensure that we all understood the context properly, along with studying our game engine of choice and creating simple ideas. Then, we began working on each of our parts, coming together weekly to share progress and ideas. Throughout this project, my favorite part has been getting to work with my team and see our ideas come to life. In my position in particular, I've worked a lot in Photoshop to design graphics to fit the mood of our game, allowing me to work closely with each member of the team, and it has been a lot of fun getting to pitch ideas back and forth and come up with something we are all happy with.

    Position: Playing at Empire Intern
    Student: Undeclared Liberal Arts and Computer Science Freshman

    This semester I am working at UT Austin’s JapanLab. JapanLab focuses on collaborative efforts to build high quality digital content, especially video games, to educate people about Japanese history, literature, and language. The goal is to make these learning tools available for teachers and students around the world.

    I found this internship through my significant other who happened to find it while searching around for internship opportunities. They suggested it to me because of my interest in video games and I happily applied soon after.

    JapanLab has many different projects that change each semester. My project is “Playing at Empire: Imperial Japan through Sugoroku”. Our team is working on digitizing a sugoroku board game focusing on homefront life in Imperial Japan. Sugoroku boards are often full of popular ideas and Japanese cultural customs at the time of their creation. Our job is to uncover their historical significance, clean up the information, and present it in the form of a polished video game.

    Our team is split into two groups. The narrative team focuses on researching each tile on the board and compiling the information into a digestible format. The coding team, the one I am on, is responsible for programming the game using C# and developing visuals with the Unity game engine. We meet weekly to go over tasks and update each other on our progress. The workload takes up toaround 4-8 hours a week to complete.

     My favorite aspect of this internship is the collaborative aspect of it. This is my first exposure to working on large projects with a team and I have enjoyed the experience so far. Everyone is eager to see the game to its completion. I highly recommend this internship to anyone interested in getting comfortable with academic research or programming. I have learned a lot so far and working on this project has been well worth my time.

    Fall 2022

    Position: Mapping Play through a Treaty Port Intern
    Student: East Asian Studies and East Asian Cultures and Languages Senior

    This semester I am working with a UT-affiliated company called JapanLab. JapanLab is working to generate a steady stream of digitalized traditional Japanese boardgames such as sugoroku as well as other Digital Humanities content in the hopes of making Japanese history readily available to students. I found this internship through fliers passed around by the professors teaching Japanese language and culture classes. The title of my internship is “Mapping Play through a Treaty Port”, and my team is working on digitalizing a sugoroku called “The Catalogue Trip to Yokohama,” which focuses on the modernization of Japan during the Meiji period within Yokohama treaty port. Our team contains a lead programmer, a game interface designer, a narrative designer, and project co-leaders. As narrative designer and co-lead I am in charge of crafting the game’s narrative text as well as historical background in addition to coordinating my amazing team to ensure effective communication is utilized and deadlines are met. We work approximately 5-10 hours per week and meet weekly on campus to check up on each other’s progress and discuss/adjust milestones. My favorite thing about this internship is my fantastic team! Everyone is equally invested in our game and excited to see the project through. I am delighted to have found fellow students at UT who are as interested is niche parts of Japanese history and language as I am. Shout out to our awesome supervisor Dr. Jessa Dahl as well!

    Position: Mapping Play through a Treaty Port Intern
    Student: Computer Science and Asian Studies Senior

     I worked for UT’s JapanLab as the lead UI/UX designer for this semester’s (Fall 2022) suguroku team. I found this internship through the emails sent out by the Asian Studies department while I was in Korea for study abroad. Through my internship, I have been in charge of leading the design of the game and have been a part of the game development by working with Unity and the coding team. We are currently at the stage to where the basic gameplay is almost complete and are beginning to work on adding extra elements to the game. So far my favorite part of the internship has been incorporating both my technology skills and knowledge about Japan.

    Position: Mapping Play through a Treaty Port Intern
    Student: International Relations and Global Studies and Asian Studies Senior

    The company that I am interning with is the JapanLab – a digital humanities center aiming to
    communicate primarily Japanese history to a wider audience via technological platforms. I found this
    position through my one of my classes and the Asian Studies newsletter sent out to all students in my
    major. My duties included researching and writing mainly. Our project is trying to convey the Sengoku
    period in Japanese history to a wider audience, so we go through many scholarly articles and books in
    order to compile enough information to prove our point. In the first week alone, I had to read a lot
    (200+ pages) and then present to my associates on the topic. It was difficult, but usually the work is on
    average much less week by week. I have also been tasked in creating immersive descriptions of key
    figures during this time period, which has been fun. My favorite part about this internship is the chill environment and my associates. Often, we end up just discussing random stuff or things we are interested in during the meetings. It is a great place to express yourself in and convey your passion for Japan. I highly recommend it if you want a way of expressing this interest of yours outside the classroom. 

    Position: Mapping Violence in Medieval Japan Intern
    Student: Asian Studies Senior

    The organization I intern for is UT Japan Lab. Japan Lab is a great organization that  brings together groups of people to create digital content about Japanese history, literature, and language like educational games, timelines, and maps. I found this internship through many professors within a variety of Asian Studies classes that dealt with Japan. My professors took their time to tell their classes about the projects that Japan Lab was offering. Being an intern for the Japan Lab project of Mapping Violence in Medieval Japan, my duties or assignments so far is to research through books and dissertations pertaining to the legitimation of violence through the court during the Sengoku era. I also gather the evidence that I have found in these books and dissertations to put into a ClioVis timeline and eventually onto MapHub. My favorite thing about this internship is that I am gaining skills like time management and research that I can use for any future careers.

    Position: Mapping Violence in Medieval Japan Intern
    Student: International Relations and Global Studies and Asian Cultures and Languages Senior

    I’m interning at JapanLab. I initially found this internship opportunity through one of my Japanese senseis last year who told us about it at the start of class one day. I’d say this internship is a bit more akin to a research opportunity than it being more like a traditional internship. So far, most of our time has been taken up by research into the Sengoku period of Japan; more specifically, how violence was used as a means of control in the time period. All of this research is then supposed to culminate in a final project which we will be presenting at VisLab on campus in December. Overall, I’m having a lot of fun taking part in this project!

     

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  • The University of Texas at Austin- LLILAS Benson 

    Position: Digital Scholarship Intern
    Student: Psychology Junior

    This past spring semester I worked for LLILAS Benson as part of their Digital Scholarship Internship program. I didn’t know much about the field of Digital Humanities and archival research before I applied to the internship program, but my best friend who knew I had an interest in Latine culture and affairs sent me the job posting. My duties included conducting archival research about a topic I chose to create a project about, which in my case was intersectional identity in being both Latine and LGBTQ+. I learned how to conduct archival research, supplement it with other research from online library databases, and synthesize my findings to create a digital exhibit about LGBTQ+ Latines that discusses the group’s history, struggles, advocacy, and community in hopes of educating others about this group and identifying with present day LGBTQ+ Latines. Throughout the internship, we learned how to use digital tools and digital scholarship theory via weekly group discussions and workshops. My favorite part of the internship is that it is very flexible and accommodates the D.S. interns. Before applying I had to propose a project I was interested in pursuing and was able to get a lot of freedom in the means of pursuing my project- in this case the digital exhibit over LGBTQ+ Latines. This topic and project was very close to my heart and allowed me to pursue a passionate and important subject.

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  • The University of Texas at Austin - Public Safety Commission Coding Project

    Summer 2016 

    Position: Public Safety Commission Coding Project
    Student: Sociology Senior

    A typical day in the life as an intern, working on Becky Pettit’s Public Safety Commission Project, consisted of working on the computer lab in the College of Liberal Arts building or at home using your own personal computer. Having the liberty to work from home during your own time was the best part since I could go home after a long day of school to work on it. My duties, as an intern, included analyzing, coding and transcribing public videos of the Public Safety Commission meetings held each month in Austin. 

    I usually worked right after school, Monday through Friday for an hour or so each day in order to complete my assigned work. The first thing I had to do was to pick a Public Safety Commission meeting that I wanted to transcribe. Transcribing is the process of converting recordings of social or communicative human interaction into written text. Writing down of what was said is only part of the transcription task, it also involves attending to how things were said and the time they said it. The transcription then becomes the actual data used for further analysis. Transcribing is a relative simple task but it takes hours to finish transcribing multiple recordings.

    After transcribing the recording comes the analytical process of coding the qualitative data. Coding the transcription means to assign categories to the data or information into a form understandable by computer software. The classification of information is an important step in the preparation of data for computer processing with statistical software.

    In conclusion, working as an intern for Becky Pettit was an amazing opportunity to get personal insight of what it takes to work in the field of research. This opportunity has also strengthened my interest in pursuing graduate school.

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  • UT OnRamps

    Spring 2017  

    Position: Project Management Innovative Fellow
    Student: Sociology and Plan II Honors Junior 

    A typical day at OnRamps can vary greatly! I’ll run through some common meetings and tasks that I complete in a day. 

    I worked about 15hrs per week at OnRamps (sometimes more or less depending on my school schedule). I would work full days on Mondays and Wednesdays. OnRamps is on Guadalupe St., so I would usually take the 40 Acres Bus to Walter Webber and take the elevator up to the 4th floor. The OnRamps staff is composed of about 30 people, so I’ll say “Hi” to whoever I see in the office. At 9:30am, there’s a huddle meeting for about 20 minutes where the staff talks about about what there is “to do” what’s “being done” and what’s “done”. We post our tasks on a sticky note board and give each other general updates.

    From there, I’d usually log onto my OnRamps computer and check my email and calendar. Typically, I’m part of some ongoing projects that require me to use Smartsheet or edit documents in Box. Then, at 11am (only on Wednesdays) there’s a big staff meeting downstairs. The program director, Julie, leads the meeting. We do some icebreakers and major developments/changes are announced.

    After that meeting I eat lunch at my desk or go out for a short lunch break. Once a week I’ll meet with my supervisor around 3pm in the afternoon for a 30 minute check-in regarding the projects I’m a part of. After that, I usually try to finish the most urgent tasks I have for my projects. Then I make a to-do list of what needs to be accomplished when I come in the next day. 

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  • UT System Office of Governmental Relations

    Fall 2016  

    Position: OGR Student Associate      
    Student: Government Senior

    Each day I arrive to the office is a “new” day in that I do not know what to expect. However, I do have certain duties I complete routinely while being prepared for whatever else gets thrown my way by my supervisor or the other staffers. A large part of the job is being able to take care of administrative duties so that the staffers can focus on their specific jobs. I have my own desk in a cubicle with all the equipment I need to complete my daily tasks such as a computer, laptop and phone. I also have access to a printer/scanner/copier.

    Each morning when I arrive at 8 AM, I check my email to see if there have been any tasks assigned from the previous day. Next I get the mail and get it to the appropriate recipient. I then refill the printer paper trays. I also assist with answering the phones. From there, I have daily duties such as updating the calendar with legislative hearings, scanning articles for staff emails, printing press clips, assisting with ongoing research projects, and transporting staffers to meetings around Austin. I also participate in weekly staff meetings where all of the staff updates the Vice Chancellor on current projects.

    I have assisted with several long term projects during my time in the office. Most recently, I helped to update all of the background information for the Texas legislative membership. This required find their education information, profession, and current address. I also worked on a research project regarding the Governor’s technology innovation program in Texas.

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  • UT System Office of the Board of Regents

    Fall 2020

    Position: Student Associate
    Student: Government Senior

    The University of Texas (UT) System is comprised of fourteen institutions of higher education throughout the state of Texas. The Office of the Board of Regents located within the UT System office building in downtown Austin consists of support staff for the Regents who are the governing body of the System. All members of the Board are appointed by the Governor of Texas. Similar to other governing boards, the Board of Regents handles pertinent matters that affect each institution both individually and as a whole. I started at the UT System in the Office of Governmental Relations back in 2018, an internship which I found through the College of Liberal Arts’ Texas Politics Project. After a brief hiatus working in the Texas Senate for the 2019 Legislative Session, I returned to the UT System in October 2019 and began working for the Office of the Board of Regents. During my internship, I have spent lots of time working on tracking the history of the Board and updating the rules by which the Board is governed. In my time here I have met many wonderful people and have had the privilege to experience a law office setting which has piqued my interest as a Government major at UT. One of the special parts of this internship in particular is that all members of the office are women who are some of the best in their fields. It has been an honor to be able to work alongside people I look up to and hope to stay in contact with post-graduation.

  • UT System Office of Governmental Relations

    Fall 2016  

    Position: OGR Student Associate      
    Student: Government Senior

    Each day I arrive to the office is a “new” day in that I do not know what to expect. However, I do have certain duties I complete routinely while being prepared for whatever else gets thrown my way by my supervisor or the other staffers. A large part of the job is being able to take care of administrative duties so that the staffers can focus on their specific jobs. I have my own desk in a cubicle with all the equipment I need to complete my daily tasks such as a computer, laptop and phone. I also have access to a printer/scanner/copier.

    Each morning when I arrive at 8 AM, I check my email to see if there have been any tasks assigned from the previous day. Next I get the mail and get it to the appropriate recipient. I then refill the printer paper trays. I also assist with answering the phones. From there, I have daily duties such as updating the calendar with legislative hearings, scanning articles for staff emails, printing press clips, assisting with ongoing research projects, and transporting staffers to meetings around Austin. I also participate in weekly staff meetings where all of the staff updates the Vice Chancellor on current projects.

    I have assisted with several long term projects during my time in the office. Most recently, I helped to update all of the background information for the Texas legislative membership. This required find their education information, profession, and current address. I also worked on a research project regarding the Governor’s technology innovation program in Texas.

  • Baylor College of Medicine

    Fall 2021

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Psychology

    I’m a research assistant for a lab in the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). I landed this internship primarily through networking. While working as an intern for the VA Medical Center over the summer, I met a college graduate who worked partly for the VA and partly for BCM. She introduced me to her principal investigator, and after speaking with him, I inquired about internship opportunities. I primarily work on CONN brain imaging work. I’m currently learning how to use the software, practicing with scans they have, and will soon be helping them collect data from new scans. I greatly admire the commitment and dedication to research everyone in the lab holds -- so much so that it’s my favorite part of being in the lab!

  • MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

    Summer 2021

    Position: Research Assistant
    Student: Economics

    This summer, I worked at the Global Office of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), as part of the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP). This research center is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is affiliated with MIT. I found about this internship on the program’s website as I was looking for opportunities available for international students. This program is meant for minority and first-generation students who are interested in pursuing a research career. Applicants choose a specific MIT professor in any field to work with throughout the summer. Students can choose any faculty member among the five schools at MIT: School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Sloan School of Management, and School of Science. In my case, I ranked three professors, choosing Dr. Ben Olken as the first one, and I ended up getting paired with my first choice. Besides being an economics professor, he is the director of J-PAL, which is why I did my internship at this lab.

    I joined the J-PAL’s policy and research teams during my time in Cambridge. As part of the first one, I detected personally identifiable information (PII) in a replication package from an intervention in India meant to understand how to increase access to welfare programs. Additionally, I worked on an independent project in which I analyzed data on randomized controlled trials (RCT) data downloads from J-PAL’s data repository. I did an exploratory analysis to understand what makes a dataset popular and presented the results in the program’s virtual poster session. In the policy team, I classified research projects by the quality of their cost data so that other policy associates could use this information to do cost-effectiveness analysis on them.

    My favorite thing about MSRP was its diversity. I interacted with other motivated students who are genuinely passionate about their research and want to pursue a graduate degree in their field. I learned so much from them, and we created long-lasting connections with each other. Besides, the mentorship aspect of the program is impressive, as we had weekly meetings with our mentors, who are graduate students at MIT who previously did MSRP when they were undergraduates. Learning from their advice was extremely valuable, as they are currently experiencing what we would like to do in the future. We received feedback on how to write statements of purpose, research proposals, abstracts, and research posters, which are some of the requirements for graduate school applications. I will apply what I learned when applying for a Ph.D. in economics two years from now.

    In regards to my experience in J-PAL, my favorite thing was that I contributed to real projects that are valuable for the research center. I worked with real data from past randomized experiments, which was pretty exciting. I also value the mentorship part of J-PAL, as I had weekly meetings with my supervisor and with another research associate. They even helped me in the process of figuring out a topic for my senior thesis, which I am currently writing. Finally, I met people from the other branches, and everyone was friendly and willing to help. It is fascinating how J-PAL connects research and policy by finding answers to questions on critical matters that affect the world and doing policy outreach on these results. I would love to go back and work for a couple of years at this research center before going to graduate school.

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