HIS 5944 (2/27-3/5/2021)

The publication of the interviews given is now available for public viewing which has properly motivated me to continue this project. I am very proud with how they were and, after viewing a few, I decided to incorporate feedback from it into future interviews. I will be posting a link to the STARS link on UCF for any interested to view. To continue the privacy of this blog, Mary Rubin’s interview of me will be the one I link for those interested.

Scott Galloway STARS Interview: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/covid19-memory/3/ 

Marketing Mondays have been working well yet Mary and I realized that the slow stream of interviews may be concerning. Mary noted that she would be working on having a social media post for the project to continue gathering interview participants. I thought that was best for now while I persisted with the professors I emailed. One of them had immediately expressed interest within the Computer Science Department which I am very honored to interview. This will allow the project to further broaden the parameters of our interviewees. A method I came up with last semester was the “ark” method inspired by Noah’s Ark. Two interviewees from a department that will allow the project to properly give representation to UCF’s population. A future endeavor would be considering the majors and departments that the project covers for a proper analysis on representation.

 This week regarding marketing saw me reaching out for participants in RSO’s and Student Government within the university. I successfully reached out to the Student Government President during their tenure between 2020 to 2021 as well as the speaker of the Student Government’s legislative branch. There was one concern that I had thought about which was the RSO’s I have reached out to are rather political in nature. This raises an issue with how they may perceive the interview and if they may alter the course of it. I shared the concern with Mary and was given some advice for interviewing them.

With the “ark” method, we will only be interviewing two of them from the organizations as well as steer the conversation towards the talk about COVID-19 rather than about a political message. It can be quite difficult as COVID-19 seems to already spark talks about politics and policies regarding how the United States and UCF handled the pandemic. However, I am confident that these interviews will show the activism of students attempting to inspire changes within a global pandemic. There seems to always be the risk of the interviewee expressing desire to discuss something that is not in line with the true purpose of the project.

However, this experience will help me become a better interviewer and teach me communication skills to properly realign the conversation. This internship has certainly improved my email and communication skills to properly convey the purpose of the project and advertise for it. While historians or history students usually write for their audiences of like-minded individuals, the true skill of a historian is appealing to the reader and hooking them to either understand or seek further knowledge of a subject. In a way, this is similar with making sure the interviewee continues to understand the purposes of this project.