Learning to Follow Your Own (Career) Path

One of the aspects of my internship that I've enjoyed the most is the highly collaborative nature of the projects I'm working on.  I get to attend the weekly RICHES staff meetings (via Zoom, thanks to the pandemic), and it is very interesting to get a glimpse at how each member of the team contributes to the program's goals, and the variety of tasks that go into developing, maintaining, and marketing a digital repository.  

RICHES team members discuss their work with outreach, collections development, tech wizardry, digital collections management and metadata creation, and communications, as well conducting oral histories, coordinating events, applying for grants, and contributing to department- and university-wide initiatives.  Given this list of responsibilities, you might expect the meeting attendance to be enormous, but there are usually around five faculty and staff members at each meeting.  You can find a of team members and their biographies here.

I find it particularly astounding that for each of these team members, the RICHES program is only one of their duties within the History, Texts & Technology, Games & Digital Media, and Institute for Simulation and Training departments at UCF.  Dr. Connie Lester, the Director of the RICHES program, is also the editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly, and teaches undergraduate and graduate history classes.

This is far from the first time that I have been amazed at the juggling skills demonstrated by faculty and staff in the History department.  Between teaching, researching, writing, serving on committees, contributing to internal and external projects such as RICHES and Bending Toward Justice, to be entirely honest, I'm not sure when many of them sleep (and to be fair, I have received plenty of emails in the late hours of the night and the wee hours of the morning).  

On a more serious note, it has been invaluable for me to have the experience of closely shadowing History faculty members, both as an intern as a GRA/GTA, and to get a clear-eyed, "warts and all" view of the level of seemingly 24/7 commitment and intense drive that is necessary to succeed in academia.  Although I am proud of my work ethic, and am not afraid of hard work, it has made me realize that I think I am better suited to my chosen career path, as an archivist.  While it can also be very stressful in its own way, overall, I think the pace of life is a bit more relaxed, and I feel more at home in a position where I get to interact with the public and work with archival materials.  

At some level, I think I have always held a secret, deep-down idea that I would not be truly living up to my intellectual potential unless I pursued a PhD and became a professor.  It has been very meaningful to realize over the past year that I should have trusted myself all along--I was on exactly the path that I needed to be following!  I would imagine that it might be similar to a nurse realizing that even though she would have been a perfectly capable physician, she had made the right decision to pursue nursing.  At the same time, I am learning brand new skill sets that I can take with me once I graduate, and that will make me a better archivist and allow me to work more effectively with historians, in both the reading room and the classroom.