Week 3: Moving Forward

The third week of this fall internship begins, and the building anticipation I harbored proved to be for very good reason. This week I was finally able to arrange a meeting with the program coordinator for the Department of History at UCF, Jessie Oldham. Jessie has sprawling roots in the UCF History Department, and is deeply involved in many of the department's events, programs, and projects -- including, but not limited to, her role as the project manager for the Veterans History Project here at the university. Her enthusiasm for discovering, preserving, and recording our public history is electrifying and very contagious. Meeting with her was exciting and the information provided on my role here as an intern gave me so much to look forward to in the upcoming week, and the months that lie ahead. Along with the plethora of volunteer opportunities and elective events that the Public History Center offers that I now have privilege to, this project truly has so much to offer.

For my own particular role in this project, I will be conducting interviews with veterans, processing these interviews, and managing the metadata to make them easily found and accessed. While I certainly knew this was a large part of what the VHP does, I was not yet quite certain where I would be most needed and how I would be helping move the project along in my time here. I am so excited to be documenting the personal experiences of these service members first hand. It is absolutely understandable that some may find interviews to be intimidating, or even unpleasant or awkward (and at times they can be!), but I personally calm my nerves by focusing on the gratitude and eagerness I feel for the opportunity to be part of preserving these stories in history. 

I have some experience in freelance interviewing that I have conducted with my peers in the Media and Production Management program at UCF, but the interviews we are to be conducting with veterans has a very different strategy at hand. Journalism often allows for, or encourages, guiding an interview in a certain direction by offering leading questions that allow the subject to follow a theme or tone of the discussion. While documenting the life stories of these service members, it is imperative that the person conducting the interview provide as little interference as possible in the story telling process. I am not there to guide any subject into telling certain parts of their story, outside of the limited structure we provide, such that the interviewee has the greatest opportunity to tell their story as they feel matters -- highlighting important parts as they see fit and neglecting details that they find unimportant. What is said and what is unsaid in these meetings matters a great deal, and reflects on the experience and impact of the story being told.