Week 1 - 01/12/2026 to 01/16/2026

Welcome to the first week of my internship under the New Smyrna Museum of History (NS MOH) at the University of Central Florida (UCF). From it, I hope to gain more experience in the field of history and enhance my resume.

My name is Thomas Manoly, and I am currently majoring in History (B.A. – Bachelor of Arts) with a minor in Information Technology. Although I have been a student at UCF since the Fall 2022 Semester, I switched over from Aerospace Engineering (B.S. – Bachelor of Science) less than a week after the Summer 2024 Semester ended, which was also shortly before the Fall 2024 Semester began. My research interests are 20th century, American, colonial, cultural, media, public, and technological history

This is actually not the first time I have done an internship, as I had one under People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel – Migration in the Early Modern World (PRINT) with Dr. Rosalind Beiler as the project director, and Dr. Scot French as the professor for its host course, HIS4944-C001 (Internship in Public History) for Section C (12 Weeks) of the Summer 2025 Semester. This internship also has a host course, HIS4941-0001 (Internship) for Section 1 (16 Weeks) of the Spring 2026 Semester with Mike Shier as the possible project director (I have not looked into that aspect too much yet) and Dr. French from before as the professor. In fact, I was initially reluctant to take HIS4941 because I did not realize it was a separate course and thought HIS4944 would be overridden as a result.

Monday (January 12) was the first day of my internship, and I just did onboarding work by looking at content related to digitization and the museum. One example of the latter was a video on YouTube, which among other things, discussed New Smyrna Beach’s development after the Second World War.

Tuesday (January 13) was the second day of my internship, and the first one where I actually did real work for it, which was this blog post.

Wednesday (January 14) was the third day of my internship, and it involved an in-person meeting with Dr. Scot French and the other team members in Room 325 of the Trevor Colburn Hall (TCH) building. It lasted from 3:00PM to around 4:00PM, which perfectly overlapped with the first portion of my shift that day. I introduced myself, while plans for our schedules were brought up afterwards. A technical error when we attempted to scan a newspaper page from a book occurred as well.

Thursday (January 15) was the fourth day of my internship, and it was very boring, as no scanning could take place until me and the other team members set schedules which allowed for us to work together while having some independence. As a result, I worked on/updated my own schedule and sent it to Dr. French after completion.

Friday (January 16) was the fifth day of my internship, and I was not in the office as I had already logged in the required twelve hours using a stopwatch to verify it in case of any scrutiny.

Have a good day and thank you for reading this blog.



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