Saturday, March 21, 2009

While The Boys Are Away...

Jim and Pete are off conferencing in Ocean City. I am sure they are not enjoying the frigidly cold temperatures and the brisk ocean breezes. The weather isn't much better back here in northwest Ohio but I have a task to accomplish that brightens my day...internship application review.

Thanks to our Preserve America grant the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project can have a great summer internship program this year. Some of our readers and volunteers may recall that we had two interns in the field with us during last summer's ASM field session. These students were from Stevenson University, near Baltimore. Jim teaches at Stevenson so he got to select the interns last summer. This summer it is my turn and the interns will come from my institution, Heidelberg University, near Toledo.

This summer's internship will be much more intensive than last summer as the interns will be living at Port Tobacco for 5 weeks while conducting fieldwork. Heidelberg will once again provide us with a van for transportation but the 9 hour drive is not one we want to make several times over the summer.

So today I am working on a summer fieldwork schedule and trying to see just how many interns we can accommodate in our budget. Internships are a crucial aspect of professional training for archaeology students. While many internships are available, most are unpaid. By offering paid internships we are giving upper level undergraduates their first paid job in their chosen field. That is worth more than the paycheck itself.

Plan to come out and work alongside our interns this summer. The applicants are all worthy of this opportunity once you meet them I am sure you would agree.

-April

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