I learned about the internship at Alabama Heritage when I was a first-year master’s student. I had read about internship opportunities for undergraduates on the English department’s website and learned from both AH’s website and my graduate advisor that there were similar such opportunities available for graduate students as well. Since I had just completed a somewhat disappointing first semester of graduate school (due in no way to my professors or classes and entirely to my own unrealistic expectations about grad school and academia) I was curious to see what “real world” applications existed for English majors like myself. 

Being from out of state, working at Alabama Heritage has given me the opportunity to learn more about Alabama. Never particularly drawn to American history (and especially states’ histories), I found myself engrossed more and more in the material these articles presented and the personal histories they illustrated. Editing work on such personal histories as those of Truman Capote and Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, these stories of Alabama have become a part of my own story in ways I never imagined. I realized by working here that history does not always exist in the dry information from a textbook; in fact, most history—especially that of the South—exists in the form of stories, the literature to which I was so devoted at the university.

You could definitely say that I covered a lot of ground at Alabama Heritage, working as an intern for both the editorial and marketing department. I spent most of my time fact-checking and editing articles, reviews, and galleys before the magazine went to print. Because of the publication’s historical content, most of the time my research came from online databases, scholarly articles, or specific books from the University of Alabama’s library. I certainly learned my way around academic search engines! When I wasn’t in the library, I stayed at my desk to perform photo research or write abstracts for online editions to be uploaded to the website.