Major: History

Hometown: Minneapolis, MN

I work for the Northfield Historical Society. I am a collaborative assistant on a project to put materials from the society on a website. My position involves scanning documents (mostly photographs) into the computer. I also work in the Arboretum but during the winter the Arb cannot offer its workers the same amount of hours so I was looking around on the website that posts job offerings and saw the one with the historical society, which I felt was perfect considering that I am going to be a history major.

I learned how to watermark photographs and how to operate a scanning program as well as gaining some insight into the organization of historical photographs as well as the planning behind modernizing the storage of historical information. The computer skills will be useful generally because it never hurts, in this day and age, to know more about computers. And the insight into record keeping will be very useful to me because I plan to go on to graduate school and eventually get a doctorate in history which will involve working with records a lot.

I work there four hours a week. The easiest way for me to balance all my work and activities is to plan carefully and stay organized. As long as I know when all my commitments are I can always fit work in around it. Keeping track of when assignments are due also allows me to prioritize amongst them so I always complete my work on time.

My goal is to hopefully make a good enough impression that I could be invited back even if there is no longer work for me associated with the program. It would be great to hold onto a job for the remainder of my time at Carleton that is so closely related with what I want to do with my life. I hope that being a hard worker and always arriving at time will allow me to accomplish this goal.