Blogs

When I learned that the task that my supervisor had set out for me was to organize and digitize the donor files, I had no idea what any of that meant. However, working on this project has been one of the most rewarding career-oriented experiences I have had so far. 

Looking over 600 rows of names, starting in 1931, it was easy to get lost in the data and lose sight of the human stories. This was a task I progressed in my internship with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh to help reconstruct the department’s history for an upcoming centennial. 

At first, this project really just felt like working through a spreadsheet. Rows of names, dates, degrees, and dissertation titles – starting in the 1930s and moving forward year by year. Some entries were detailed, others were incomplete, and a lot of them just blended and confused together. It was easy to focus on cleaning the data instead of thinking about the people behind it.