Week 14: The End

 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

Here is my long overdue final post for my RICHES internship. This was the last week for being an intern and being an undergraduate student. I will be graduating in early May with I am very excited for that. This whole experience was fantastic, and I truly believe that what made it so enjoyable was the people on the RICHES team. I want to thank Dr. Lester for giving me this opportunity, I was going into this semester without getting an internship and thought I would just have a regular school schedule before she offered me the position. I also want to thank Geoffrey Cravero. While I enjoyed working and talking with everyone on the team, I was really under Geoff most of the time and communicated with him. He was someone that I felt very comfortable approaching and asking for more clarification on assignments as well as took the time to sit down with me and explain different elements of assignments that I was having trouble on. Lastly, I want to thank the rest of the team, which include Kirk, Diana, Jessie, and Peter for making a friendly work environment with our weekly meetings.

For the foreseeable future, I will actually still be working with RICHES for the following weeks. I am still finishing up on an assignment and I will not leave than unfinished. Also, with my graduation, I will be having a lot of free time this summer. While I am waiting for the last of my decisions from graduate school and/or looking for jobs, I have decided that I will at least take a month off. I will take that time and volunteer to help RICHES with whatever they need done.

As a final send off, for any future interns that may be reading this, I cannot stress how fun and important this internship experience was for me. As I stated at this years internship fair, RICHES was not my first pick of where I wanted to intern. It was not even on my radar until I was offered the position. It was something that I took on a whim that I thought might have just added a lot of work to my already busy schedule and was even considering not continuing with the internship. However, this internship allowed me to use the skills that I have been polishing in the classroom these past 4 years and put them to use in a professional setting and in an environment where I can learn from my mistakes. Having a supportive team like RICHES allowed me to try, and fail, at these assignments without feeling bad or having repercussions. If you have an opportunity to start an internship, or are considering starting the process, I highly recommend that you do so, it will be work it!