Tag Archives: 2019

A Postcard From: Linghan Mei ’19

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Name: Linghan Mei
Class Year: 2019
Major: Biology and German
Hometown: Urumqi, China

This summer I worked in a transporter biology lab at the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. I applied to this internship because I had hoped to experience biomedical research in a slightly different capacity after working in the Brodfuehrer Lab in the Biology Department on campus for a whole year. It was a refreshing change of scenery living in the Midwest, and working in a large medical center provided me with excellent mentorship and opportunities to attend lectures given by top-notch clinicians and researchers.

Working in a lab where the mentors have less pedagogical responsibilities is interesting since everyone in the lab is fully devoted to pushing the research progress forward. This was initially challenging to me as the pace at work can seem very stressful, and it’s not uncommon to have a full house in lab even on weekends. Nevertheless, my mentors provided us a conducive environment for learning. My peers and I were required to present on our individual progress every week at lab meeting and participate in seminars given in the department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering. I was encouraged to question the approaches that we used in the project and think critically about the strengths and limitations of different approaches. I also attended weekly mini-lectures on physiology of the kidney and urinary system which gave me a taste of the density of lectures in graduate school.

What I enjoy the most was working with both young and experienced researchers with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds. I was drawn to engineering because of its ability to translate knowledge into solution and this process of translation takes expertise in almost all the fundamental sciences. The effective integration of different ways of thinking always proves to be the key to success.

The graduate school played an important role in supporting us by organizing various panels and networking events that connected us with clinicians, researchers, and graduate students of diverse backgrounds. As a rising senior, their great advice and fascinating stories helped me put things into perspective and feel more confident and assured about my career path.

A Postcard From: Sophie Webb ’19

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Name: Sophie Webb
Class Year: 2019
Major: Sociology
Hometown: Durham, N.H.

Internship Placement: HeadCount
Title: Music and Politics Intern
Location: New York, N.Y.

My internship at HeadCount is a nice combination of work in the office and work in the field. HeadCount is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that sends volunteers to concerts, festivals, and community events. I spend Monday through Friday at the HeadCount office in midtown, and attend concerts on the weekends. Occasionally I go away for a long weekend to a music festival to register voters. I was able to attend the Bonnaroo music festival, the Peach Music Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, and the Lockn’ Music Festival.

At the field events, I spend my time engaging concert goers by registering them to vote or getting them signed up for election alerts. I’ve met a lot of cool people through this, both fellow volunteers, and people registering to vote! At the office, I process the voter registration forms and send them to the appropriate states, assist with artist relations, and basically do anything that is helpful!

I happened upon this internship randomly when I was searching for music industry internships online. When I read the description, I knew I immediately wanted to apply because it is a marriage of two of my passions, music and activism. The internship seemed like it would offer me the perfect mixture of fun and work, while allowing me the opportunity to engage in work that was meaningful.

My favorite part of the internship has been all the amazing people that I have met and gotten to work with. Everybody that I work with at HeadCount has been incredibly welcoming and kind. I felt respected as an important aspect of the team, even though I was just an intern. I feel like this summer has expanded my entire world, and it feels incredible to have so many new friends and connections.

Living in a large metropolitan area for the first time in my life was a bit nerve-wracking but ended up being amazing. It was really fun and empowering to learn my neighborhood and start to feel a little bit like a New Yorker! I got extremely lucky with my roommates and apartment, and that made all the difference! Getting to experience the city this summer has made me realize that living in the city after I graduate is something that I may be interested in pursuing.

A Postcard From: Joy Rukanzakanza ’19

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Name: Joy Rukanzakanza
Class Year: 2019
Major: International Studies
Hometown: Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Internship: BlackRock Inc.
Title: Aladdin Client Services Intern
Location: New York, Summer 2019

When I received my internship offer from BlackRock last fall, I had mixed emotions. I was ecstatic for a golden opportunity to engage a firm which is the world’s largest in the asset management industry, given my non-traditional academic background. However, my emotions were vacillating owing to this overwhelming inherent fear of failure. I would have to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world, get affordable housing, figure out my way around the city and find a group of friends to ensure I keep my sanity during the summer. All of this was worsened by the fact that I am not a finance major, neither am I an economics guru nor a computer science student and here I was, about to pursue a 10-week program at a Wall Street firm with a role that integrated my Achilles heels — finance and technology.

It wasn’t until my internship commenced that I realized that no amount of preparation could have readied me for the summer, because even if one had vast backgrounds in both finance and technology, BlackRock was still a new company with different subject matters and different ways of tackling different challenges. The first two weeks were extremely challenging because we underwent intensive coding drill sessions, which exposed me to so many new ways of solving problems and still enlightened me on how much I did not know — which meant sleepless study nights during the summer.  Instead of that demoralizing me, it prompted me to develop strategies on how to be an excellent performer despite having minimal resources and background knowledge. I found myself strategically devising ways of not only being a good fit for the role but of making the role a good fit for me as well.

At the BlackRock Office — New York.

I looked no further than my major. Being an International Studies major meant that I had enjoyed the benefits of pursuing a plethora of disciplines in the social sciences field — from studying ethnography in anthropology to learning about the impact of power struggles in political science. This course load helped me develop a holistic view of the world, shape different patterns of thought around issues that affect us on a daily and consolidated my presentation and teamwork capabilities since there were group presentations on almost every course I took. I therefore applied my presentation skills which were constantly sculpted during my academic career at Bryn Mawr during the internship, which worked in my favor since group presentations formed the core of my internship experience. As an intern in the Aladdin Client Services (ACS) division, a role which requires one to constantly communicate with clients and tackle challenging problems with the most professional demeanor, applying that skillset helped set a solid foundation for success during the summer.

Apart from learning about the business of the firm, the internship proffered me opportunities to establish professional and social networks through avenues such as coffee chats, firm-wide social events and volunteering opportunities. Most importantly, I was honored to be part of an organization that not only cares about delivering high-quality service to its clients, but also cares about the communities those clients come from as well. It is such principles, coupled with a fulfilling summer experience, that therefore aided my decision to return to BlackRock for a full-time opportunity next year.

Community Service Day — Governor’s Island.

With some of my intern friends at the firm-wide social event — Boat Basin.

That joyful moment when you have just finished your capstone project presentation.

A Postcard From: Jasmine Mirfattah ’19

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Before I tell you about what I did this summer, let me ask you a question: have you heard of “Where’s Waldo”?

Okay, so for those of you who haven’ t, it’s a children’s book where you have to find this dude named Waldo in an image of a crowded scene.

The reason why I brought up Where’s Waldo is because trying to find him can be just as difficult to find as a white-fingered mud crab, which is native to the Chesapeake Bay and what I spent a lot of time working with this summer while I was interning at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The work I did for my independent project at SERC revolved around the Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project, which is a long-term study that takes population data on these mud crabs as well as various other organisms; the way that it works is that we take collectors filled with oyster shells and deploy them in various locations around the Chesapeake Bay and, after 2 months, retrieve, dump the contents onto a screen and place all the crabs into a bottle. And they can be very difficult to see, as they can range in size from the size of a bottle cap to as small as a tick. Also, it is important to note that there are a total of 72 of these collectors in five different estuaries, with 10 locations in each one, with one to two collectors at each location. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of crabs.

The only way we would be able to complete this every year in a timely manner is with volunteers, or as we like to call them, citizen scientists! We have people work in teams to collectively find and collect all the crabs. However, a big concern that comes to mind when working with volunteers is their data quality, which is a recurring and understandable concern. These data that the citizen scientists collect are used for real science research, so it is important that they do it systematically and thoroughly. Because of this, after each team is finished sorting, we have them switch screens and verify another team’s collector to find any missing crabs, which then becomes the original team’s error rate.

Thus, the main question that is often asked, and the question that I tried to answer with all this information, is whether different groups of people collect data differently. And to answer that question, we needed to have information on the people that participated in the project; since 2015, volunteers are asked to fill out a voluntary survey that gives information like the person’s age, level of education, profession and experience in this or related projects as well as an informed consent agreement that allows us to use that information in this study. With that information, the volunteers can then be appropriately grouped by their various demographics. I have since take that data and integrated it with the crab data to create a database using the programming language, R, to do statistical analysis on their data quality. Now that the database is complete, the actual analysis can begin; in the coming months, I will do this analysis to hopefully answer our main question and related questions of volunteer demographics and data quality.

A Postcard From: Ellen Wright ’19

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Name: Ellen Wright
Class Year: 2019
Major: Sociology
Hometown: St. Louis, Mo.

Internship Placement: Global Fund for Children
Job Title: Intern
Location: Washington, D.C.

My project supervisor Kim approached my fellow Bryn Mawr intern Meagan and I a few weeks into our internships about us facilitating parts of the Latin America and Caribbean team’s annual retreat. She explained that the goal of the retreat was for the four members of the LAC team to assess what their priorities would be for the coming 19th fiscal year of Global Fund for Children, and us serving as facilitators would not only give us a chance to involve ourselves but also allow her a chance to focus on participating in the meetings. Meagan and I were both happy to opt in, and to raid the office supply room for markers and sticky notes.

Meagan and I were placed in charge of facilitating three sections of the week-long retreat—the after-action review of the Novo Migration project, as well as the issue and country prioritization sessions.

For the after-action review, all staff were invited to participate in an assessment of how the work was going as GFC entered the second year of the three-year project. The Novo Migration project represents one of the latest pieces of GFC’s developing mission and model. Since its founding in 1997 by Bryn Mawr alum Maya Ajmera, GFC has been a grant-making institution funding nascent grassroots organizations dedicated to a range of topics relating to children and youth, from encouraging children’s development through sports to helping survivors of child trafficking. The Novo Migration project, however, would be one of the first efforts of GFC to combat challenges at a structural level, by building a cohort of partners all dedicated to a single goal of serving adolescent migrant girls. This meeting was an opportunity for GFC to reflect on what had gone well, and what could be improved as similar projects roll out.

It was exciting as a sociology major to witness GFC not only consider the larger systemic issues confronting adolescent migrant girls in addition to addressing their immediate needs, but also evolve their grant-making to thinking of affecting greater structural change with more advocacy-focused work. This type of structural-based thinking was echoed in the issue and country prioritization sessions Meagan and I led.

During the retreat, the team identified LGBT+ youth in the LAC region as a target population they wanted to prioritize, and as an intern I had the opportunity to draft the Issue Strategy Report which will eventually be realized as the latest cohort organized by GFC. As a sociology major concerned with developing intentional programs designed to address larger social change, I helped to locate potential partners and identify both the challenges confronting LGBT+ youth in the LAC region as well as the responses we hoped to see from the grassroots-level. I had applied for the internship at GFC because I believed strongly in focusing change around the grassroots-level, and getting to be a part of their next project on a topic I care deeply about was an unbelievable experience.

Learn more about Bryn Mawr’s Department of Sociology and LILAC Internship Partners.

A Postcard From: Allegra Wham ’19

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Name: Allegra Wham
Class Year: 2019
Major: Sociology
Hometown: Arlington, Va.

Internship Placement: Pilot Light Chefs
Job Title: Public Health Intern
Location: Chicago

This summer, I lived and worked in Chicago! I interned at Pilot Light Chefs, a food education nonprofit. Pilot Light was founded by four Chicagoland chefs to bring food education to low-income schools in the South Side through everyday school subjects.

Traditionally, a chef volunteer comes in to a classroom in one of the 15 partner schools and helps teach a lesson that deals with food; these often have greater purposes, like teaching empathy. The lessons brought to the classrooms are created in a collaboration between teachers and chefs. I sat in on a couple of lesson planning days where teachers and chefs added to the lesson deck and it was amazing to see these two seemingly separate careers come together in one room. Moreover, the lessons are streamlined with Pilot Light’s Food Education Standards, which are the first of its kind. These standards help set the path for students to learn how food can create common threads between their classmates, family members, and someone walking by them on the street. These standards also show students how advocacy can play into their everyday lives; all of the lessons created include potential advocacy projects that students in different grade bands can do.

The 7 Food Education Standards are:

  • Food connects us to each other.
  • Foods have sources and origins.
  • Food and the environment are interconnected.
  • Food behaviors are influenced by external and internal factors.
  • Food impacts health.
  • We can make positive and informed food choices.
  • We can advocate for food choices and changes that impact ourselves, our communities, and our world.

I honestly didn’t know that much about food education going in and it was enlightening to read these standards (and their larger descriptions) on my first day of work.

This summer I was given many different tasks — I researched, wrote thank you notes to donors, designed materials to be handed out at different events, created decks for stakeholders, helped with the curriculum library, created packets to send to organizations for grants, and more. In addition, while I wasn’t able to see a lesson in a school, I did get to see (and participate in) a mini lesson three times a week for three weeks. PL had a first-time partnership with the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. A PL teacher on her summer break would make rice bowls with campers from a different Chicago Parks Camp and I got to help! We would make these bowls with half of the campers for 40 minutes and then they would switch and “workout” in the Blackhawks’ practice arena training room. One of the best parts was introducing foods, many of which we take for granted, to these kids and seeing their faces. Many of the kids tried blueberries, raspberries, and broccoli for the first time. I feel really lucky to have worked at PL because I learned so much about food education, public health, and, though it sounds cliché, myself and what I want to potentially do after BMC.

My supervisor, and the Executive Director of PL, is actually a Bryn Mawr alum, which was really fun! I found out about PL through talking to her in the spring. It was really inspiring to work with her and see a strong and successful grad. I really enjoyed working in and learning about food education/public health and exploring Chicago!

 

A Postcard From: James Frazier ’19

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Name: James Frazier
Class Year: 2019
Major: Anthropology
Hometown: Albuquerque, N.M.

Placement: Koobi Fora Field School
Location: East Turkana Basin, Kenya

I first learned of the Koobi Fora Field School through my anthropology professor, Maja Šešelj. Field school is … a strange thing. Broadly speaking, it is both study abroad and summer research, while still managing to be neither of those things exactly. I spent six weeks in Northern Kenya conducting a paleoecological research project. With the help of my mentor, Amanda McGrosky, I investigated how life history traits (such as reproductive strategies, life span, etc.) influenced changes in the abundance of species population during the early Paleolithic (approx. 2.6-1.8 million years ago). We will hopefully be presenting our findings at conferences this fall and next year. Since I know that paleoecology isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, in fact I knew nothing about it until field school, I’ll describe field school like this:

Imagine: 25 exhausted, jet lagged and eager students, enough scientists to start a small conference, and a support staff of the world’s most incredible mechanics and cooks that can work miracles with canned beans and rice. Now load them up into range rovers and a 16 seater, open air, ex-military Unimog and drive them up the length of Kenya.  Then send a few of them out into over 100-degree heat to walk around and collect fossils for days on end. Six weeks, 43 dik-diks, eight scorpions, 232 fossil collections, one research paper and a plan for the future later, send them all home covered in dirt. You better believe I am absolutely ready to do it again next year.

Students from Bryn Mawr have gone to the Koobi Fora Field School in the past so I was reassured about its academic rigor and I knew what an amazing experience it could be if I decided to attend; however, I also knew that my experience would inherently be different than theirs. I am a transgender man and the concerns I had about a summer spent with a small research team in an isolated region of Kenya aren’t ones shared by the average student. The research I conducted into the academics of the field schools I considered was only a small fraction of the work I did to make sure the program would be a place where I could be physically safe as well as supported. While trying to gather as much information as possible, I stumbled on an entire community of queer and trans* researchers and scientist willing to support and advise me, or put me in contact with others that might know more. Before I committed to the Koobi Fora Field School, I spoke with so many individuals who wanted nothing more than to see me succeed. Even if I had decided against going to field school, finding that community made all the work I had done worth it. I eagerly await the day I able to be a voice in that community and a support for others.

While I spent hours and days (and what sometimes felt like years) preparing for this field school, I had very little idea of what I would actually be doing when I got there. I knew the general idea of course: it’s a paleoanthropological field school in the East Turkana Basin in Northern Kenya and I’d be working on a research project with a mentor. As to how those vague ideas translated into reality, I had no clue. But I knew that with the preparation I had done, I’d be able to succeed no matter what situation I walked into. Though it wasn’t always easy, it was absolutely amazing.

One of the biggest surprises was that, while my primary interest is in biological anthropology and I plan to focus on human remains and fossil hominins, for field school I was assigned to a paleoecology project. Paleoecology is not a field I have ever explored, and at first I was concerned that my background would mean I wouldn’t be able to complete the project. Plus, since I plan on studying humans I was worried that a summer spent studying paleoecology might not be the most useful to me. That, however, was an oversimplification of the project. Yes, it was the summer of paleoecology, but it was also a time where I learned how to code, analyze data and present it to others in meaningful way. I got experience working in the field, building relationships and making connections with other researches. And it turns out, once I let myself be open to it, I actually love paleoecology and I may even be rethinking my career path.

The experiences I gained during field school, the relationships I’ve made and the conversations I’ve had, have already influenced not only my academic studies for the upcoming year, but how I am approaching my future. Each researcher focused on a different field of anthropology and geology and each person was deeply passionate about their work. The summer has taught me that I don’t need to settle, that there is still so much to learn, and so many areas to explore. I am working to find a career that will let me keep and use that passion every single day.

A Postcard From: Shannan Stafford ’19

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Name: Shannan Stafford
Class Year: 2019
Major: Political Science, Psychology; Minor: Education

Internship Placement: The Franklin Institute
Job Title: Museum Programs & Outreach Initiatives Intern/Science Education Intern
Location: Philadelphia

Hey y’all! It’s almost the end of the summer and I am happy to report that I have learned that working with museum programming is way more fun than I thought it would be. This summer I have been interning at The Franklin Institute, a science museum focused on inspiring people of all ages to learn more about science and technology. My main goal for this internship was to learn more about how STEM can be made more accessible for elementary and middle school kids and what that could look like in both formal and informal learning. I also wanted to learn more about the types of programs and events museums can offer that utilize their vast resources for underserved communities and what that process looks like from behind the scenes. To do this, I have been helping the professional development department plan and execute their various museum programming including Community Night, Science After Hours, Leap Into Science, and their various Professional Development courses for educators.

The Franklin was a great place to explore the uses of my major in Psychology and my minor in Education because many of the professional development courses as well as the curriculum development is centered around the science of learning and helping educators understand research on the brain in order to aid in teaching. This has allowed me to gain more hands-on experiences with the content that I have learned in my psychology courses, such as Human Cognition and the multitude of courses I have taken focusing on developmental psychology.

Surprisingly, the most applicable courses to my internship have been the education courses, such as Multicultural Education and Advocating Diversity in Higher Education, which allowed me to practice creative problem-solving and learn ways to make learning or teaching engaging and relevant. As a space that hosts people from a wide range of educational backgrounds, it was really cool to see how my coursework for my major could be applied to a job that I thought would require a lot more specific training.

While the job is awesome in its own right, the perks are just as great! Interning at The Franklin has also allowed me to visit all of the various museums Philadelphia has to offer all for free and participate in science events within the city. It has also created opportunities to network with people from a wide range of professions within the museum and discover what other careers the world has to offer. Being in this space has really helped make Philly feel more like a home and has truly opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. This summer has made me infinitely more hopeful about the future, and I can’t wait to see what’s next!

A Postcard From: Aubrey Shiffner ’19

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Name: Aubrey Shiffner
Class Year: 2019
Major: History
Hometown: South Brunswick, N.J.

Internship Placement: American Philosophical Society Museum
Job Title: Curatorial Research Intern
Location: Philadelphia

I’m spending my summer working in the museum of the American Philosophical Society. APS was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin “for promoting useful knowledge” and it’s considered the oldest learned society in the U.S. Its main function is to promote scholarship in a variety of different disciplines, and it offers research grants and fellowships in the APS library. The museum connects to the Independence National Historical Park complex and puts on a yearly exhibition drawing primarily from the extensive APS collections in early American history, history of science, and Native American history.

My job for the summer is to work with the museum’s two Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellows and another BMC intern to research next year’s exhibit, which will be about mapping the early United States. It’s a mix of primary and secondary source research; most days, we work on secondary reading in the museum offices in the morning and then head to the reading room at the library after lunch. Usually, each of us works on an individual person or topic, using our preliminary research at the office to look for important related material in the library collections. Because we’re ultimately working on an exhibition, we have to consider both the visual interest of a book or item and its condition, as well as the information inside it.

Sometimes we have multiple copies of the same item and we need to pull all of them to look for differences like coloring or annotations and to see which one is in the best condition for display. On Thursday mornings, we also take field trips to other nearby museums and historical sites, which allows us to see and think about the ways that other institutions display information and what stories they are trying to tell, with the added bonus of seeing local attractions that I’ve ironically never been to, even though I live in the area.

Working at the APS has been a great experience for me, in ways that I did not expect going in. I was originally planning to go to law school after BMC and I started off applying to legal internships, but I got an email about the APS internship and it sounded so interesting that I decided to apply anyway. The thing that has always interested me the most about history is the artifacts and material culture of the past, and I love museums, so the prospect of actually working on an exhibit was too good to pass up. And as much as I would love to live in the stacks of the APS Library, the main thing I’ve realized this summer is that it really is about the objects for me. Doing archival research had a bit of a learning curve, and I feel like I’m just starting to get the hang of things after seven weeks, but I really prefer the moment when I unbox a 200-year-old book (a lot of them are in boxes for preservation purposes), and get to handle it and take it in as an object, to the part where I have to actually start reading the text.

It was a struggle for me at first, because I felt like I really didn’t know what I was doing, and on top of that, I found out I didn’t really like what I was doing. But I did love the library, and the maps (especially the ones with color and interesting cartouches), and the physical books I got to look at, even if I didn’t quite know what to do with them. Then we took a field trip to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, where one of the important maps for the exhibit is being treated. I had actually been interested in conservation for a long time, but I looked at the admission requirements for master’s programs a few times and thought that I would never be able to finish them all during undergrad (it turns out most people don’t), so I never seriously pursued it. But as we were leaving the Conservation Center, I mentioned my interest to the library’s head of conservation, who also came with us, and even though I also mentioned that I’m already a rising senior and hadn’t done most of the requirements, she was still very encouraging. I ended up having lunch with her the next week, and then with the assistant conservator the week after, and I have a meeting planned for September with another conservator they connected me to.

Ironically, now that I know I won’t become a curator, I’m starting to enjoy the research a lot more, and I’m becoming a little more comfortable with it. I haven’t completely ruled out law school, but I think I want to try to pursue the conservation path a little more seriously before I completely give up on history. Overall, this internship has been a really valuable learning experience. And even though I will use the research skills I’ve been learning throughout senior year, I actually learned a lot more about my own interests by pursuing something I thought I would like, only to find out that it really isn’t for me.

Photos courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

A Postcard From: Sydney Millar ’19

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This summer I participated in the Summer of Service program provided by the LILAC office (The Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center at Bryn Mawr). My field placement was at the Slought Foundation in West Philly, which is a nonprofit organization that aims to create dialogue surrounding cultural and sociopolitical change both locally and globally. The foundation displays work from artists from both Philadelphia and around the world, in addition to producing their own publications. The founder of the organization has also launched several other initiatives that are connected to the foundation, such as the Health Ecologies Lab, which focuses on the impact of social systems on the health of individuals and communities.

Before I began working at Slought, I was daunted by the idea of joining their team as my potential responsibilities at the center did not seem very straightforward. After about three days at Slought I realized why. Slought does not function in the same way that most nonprofits do in that the organization’s work comes in the form of long-term and usually unrelated projects, which causes the focus and needs of the organization to constantly be in flux. The nonprofit also supports a extremely small staff. There were only four people working there during the summer including myself, and many were traveling while I was at the center.

The bulk of my work at the center focused on two long-term projects. The first project I began work on was titled On the Other Side of Elsewhere, a two-year long cultural exchange that engages civic institutions in the former Eastern bloc. When I began work on the project, during the first week of my internship, my supervisor was traveling and I was introduced to the center by a research fellow. We worked in close collaboration for the first week of my internship and were able to compile a 12-page bibliography for the project. Though it might sound strange, I am glad that my first introduction to Slought was in the absence of Aaron, the founder of the organization. Working with Tung, the research fellow, afforded me the opportunity to become comfortable with the work that the center does before the beginning of my hectic schedule that accompanied Aaron’s return.

When Aaron returned to Slought we immediately began work on the second project I assisted with at the foundation. The project was titled Photographic Memory, which was an exhibition of archival imagery by Maurice Sorrell, the first Black member of the White House Photographers Association. Some of my fondest memories from working at Slought were made while developing this project. One of the highlights of the project was having the opportunity to work with Stephanie Renee, the curator of the exhibit and Sorrel’s niece. Hearing her discuss the images we displayed added a completely new dimension to the exhibition, as she had personal connections with some of the subjects of the photographs. After returning home from the experience I constantly think back to my time there, and how much I will miss all those I was able to connect with during my time there. Going forward I hope to continue to volunteer at the center when needed and encourage other Bryn Mawr students to take advantage of the wide array of programming that Slought offers during the year.