By: Jessica Ivetich, Bicentennial Intern, Class of 2017, Journalism, Bloomington
Hi, everyone! My name is Jessica Ivetich, and I am working with the Office of the Bicentennial as an intern this fall. I’m a senior majoring in Journalism with a focus in public relations, and I’m in complete denial that I’m almost done with my collegiate career at this incredible university.
One of the great things about working with the Bicentennial is that each intern is assigned a specific project that aligns with their interests.
In my application for the program, I stressed that I had a large interest in student organizations, and that as a large component of student life, they should be further researched. During my interview for the position, the Bicentennial staff mentioned that they had an idea that closely connected to this interest: The Student Organization Archive Collection Project.
This project, nestled under the Bicentennial Archives Development and Deployment Signature Project, is designed to help student organizations archive their history, whether that means finding archives from the past or starting fresh from this point forward.
We are already four weeks into the project, and are just finishing the first of three stages.
Once the planning phase is complete, we move forward to the outreach and documentation phases and ideally collect archives from several different student organizations by the end of this semester!
One of the best things about this internship is meeting so many new people that love IU as much as, or even more than, I do. Everyone I encounter has such detailed knowledge of IU, and it’s truly incredible to behold.
A few weeks into my internship, I met with my external mentor for the program, former Dean of Students Dick McKaig.
He just returned from a lovely trip throughout Europe, and if that’s what retirement looks like, then sign me up! He is a great person to talk to, and is ready and willing to help us with whatever we may need in order to further this project.
It’s really incredible how much knowledge administrators, faculty, and staff have concerning the history of this University.
This project has not only introduced me to new people, but to new bits of the past as well. At the end of this semester,
I should ideally have organizational archives to preserve IU’s history for the next generation of scholars to come.
Even though we are first focusing on the IU Bloomington campus as a test site, this project has the potential to reach all of IU’s campus locations before 2020. I’m really excited to see how far this project progresses this semester and what we can collect in contribution to the Bicentennial!
