Reading over my first blog post, I think my experience this summer aligned pretty well with my expectations. I wanted to get a clearer picture of what working as a humanities researcher would be like, specifically with archives, and I think I’ve learned a good deal about the experience; you’ll have to look through a lot of information that isn’t relevant to your research, parse through and read boxes upon boxes of documents, and you will likely end up developing themes that you hadn’t expected. In beginning the research, I wanted to uncover information about minority students specifically, and their research. Instead, I am focusing on the history of graduate school registration and organization and student government–I became fascinated with the boxes of regulations handbooks spanning from 1883 until 2005.
I am also starting an oral history portion to the project which I hope to continue working on throughout the year through UROP’s Research Scholars Program. I’ve met with many helpful people to talk about how to do oral history interviews and am excited to speak with Michigan Alumni about their experiences and opinions. I think this project was really helpful in solidifying my interest in archival research and humanities careers, and hopefully will continue to be a learning experience through 2026.
For future WAGSFP fellows: the ten weeks goes by pretty fast! Start thinking about your poster early, put blog deadlines into Google Calendar (they are easy to forget about), and have fun with your research. Specifically for humanities fellows, your poster probably won’t have the same structure as STEM projects, with abstract, hypothesis, and results sections; mine is more of a narrative, illustrated through a timeline and images. Overall, this has been a good introduction to academic research in my field, and I have enjoyed this opportunity.