This post was kindly written for us by our intern Grace Karrach Wood.
During September 2014 I spent 3 weeks working as a ‘digital humanities’ intern at the IHR in Senate House, London. Though most of the previous interns here had opted to work for 3 or 4 days a week for the full month, I instead opted for 5 days for 3 weeks, meaning that the experience was particularly full on and almost felt like I had already graduated and this was my new graduate job – though panicking about my dissertation at the weekends begged to differ.
On my first day I caught a far-too-early train up to Euston and spent half around half an hour pacing around London wondering how early was too early to go in and eventually arrived at reception. I filled out a few preliminary forms and was told that everybody ‘drank a lot of tea’, (which was most definitely an understatement) and that I should ‘feel free to ask lots of questions’, which I certainly did.
Throughout the weeks I was slowly given more and more tasks to work on, from listening to podcasts and writing their abstracts to proofreading and checking footnotes on unpublished journal articles. Some of my favourite tasks included learning to use Photoshop in order to edit scanned Parish maps and retouching and sizing book images for Reviews in History, as well as assessing and indexing collective volumes, as the books themselves were interesting to read and it required lateral thinking.
Although some of the tasks were less interesting than others, such as renaming map sheets, I always had a choice in what I wanted to do and was also given some more simple background tasks in order to break the day up, which meant that I always had at least 2 or 3 choices of tasks to undertake.
Overall my time spent there was enjoyable and I felt like I gained a lot experience, in terms of practical editing and writing skills as well as simply understanding what it’s like to work in an office environment and actually be awake and on a train before 9.00am. Everyone was really helpful and welcoming and the casual work wear and flexible days and hours meant the whole process was far more relaxed than stressful.