My first week at Carilion began quickly. When I first got there, I sat in on a meeting with the Marketing/Communication department that is working on the 125 year, history of the hospital project. Following this, I began familiarizing myself with how to conduct Oral History interviews, reading transcripts of Oral Histories conducted in Roanoke and reading a book ‘Century in Reflection’ about the first 100 years of Carilion’s history. This took up most of the first two days but on the third day, I began researching the first candidate I will be interviewing.
When the second week began, I was already becoming much more comfortable with the Oral History field and continued learning more about the process. In the morning, I learned to write an Into letter to send to the potential interviewee, requesting their participation in the study. After learning how to write an intro letter, I wrote one to my first candidate and we scheduled the interview for the following week. After getting confirmation, I continued to research her and wrote the questions that I would have to ask her when we met. In the afternoon, I joined 3 of the MarCom employees to tour a potential archive site for a potential Carilion exhibit project.
The next day, I joined another meeting with the department and listened as they discussed future plans and goals. Following the meeting, I sat down and reached out to my next interview candidate with an Intro letter. I quickly heard back that my second candidate would love to participate and began to research questions, however this candidate will be more challenging to find information on. Finally, to end my second week, I did my first practice interview with my supervisor.
This is bound to be a very fun and interesting internship. I have enjoyed learning about the oral history side of research and am extremely excited to continue researching and interviewing.
