Success and Challenges: Interning at the Smithsonian (#4)

One of the most prevalent flaws of mine is that I often obsessively worry and fixate on things that I cannot fix, and one way this has manifested as a challenge for my internship is how long the administrative work took to get me to where I am now.

I addition to the applying, interview, networking, and placing at my internship location, I had to go through a background investigation process (standard for all Smithsonian employees including interns), this wasn’t a problem of passing but time. It took a month of me interning before the investigation process started and then over a month before it was completed, and then after I was approved it was a week and a half to sort out the weirdness that was getting my email to work (I called the IT department three weekdays in a row before it was solved), and going into D.C. to physically pick up my intern ID badge, which is likely unnecessary unless we plan to do another Hirshhorn event that I might be needed or wanted at. All in all, it took about 140 hours of work into my first 150 hours before I had every tool I needed available to do what is expected or desired of me.

I feel like everyone would be frustrated by this, but I have a bad habit of treating it like it’s my fault that these processes take so long, even though I have little to no agency over making the process easier. Because of this I caused myself a lot of undue stress. I am working on identifying which stressors are within and without my control, but I would be lying if I said this flaw of mine did not challenge me, especially this last month or so.

Even with these challenges I’m still able to find successes, in just the last week, since getting all of the administrative things sorted, I’ve imported all of the information from my storymap drafts into the official accounts and submitted the first draft of the NTMY trunk. It’s looking good that I might be able to finish the E+O storymap draft by the End of the Day and submit that as a nice bookend for my first 150 hours, having made completed digital product drafts for two of the four trunks.

In addition to the ability and ease of doing my work, having an official Smithsonian email account comes with some other perks as well like institution wide newsletters for development, updates, events, opportunities, and excitingly, networking events specifically for SI interns and fellows. I’m really excited to attend a few of these events when possible, since they’re specifically designed to support someone like me.

Another interesting success of interning with the Smithsonian is my increasing confidence as a digital humanist, scholar, student, and worker. I feel like every graduate student I’ve met struggles with one thing in common: imposter syndrome. None of us feel like we’ve earned our spots in academia, that we all somehow trick the admissions teams, and our professors into thinking we belong. Because of this, we all seem to have a need to prove ourselves to others, but we rarely attempt to prove it to ourselves. But in the last year I’ve felt tremendous growth in my skills and confidence. I don’t always feel like I belong, but I don’t feel like an imposter anymore. Every week, I meet full time employees and contractors at the Smithsonian and work with them as colleagues, and I didn’t get here on accident. It took a lot of hard work, talking to the right people, and planning. I do want to make sure that it’s evident that this isn’t only because of my internship, but it’s probably the clearest example that most people outside of academia would understand. (For instance I’ve been working with some incredible scholars in my field, some who have been my professors over the last year, but even the professors who are arguably famous in the humanities field wouldn’t be known by my friends and family who are not in my field).

Perhaps I’m being a bit nostalgic since just this last weekend was the one-year anniversary of me moving up to my apartment in Northern Virginia to attend George Mason. I’ve been reflecting on how much has changed, how much I feel like I’ve improved. It’s significant to say in the least.