Week 11: Reflections I

It is with amazement, and some disbelief, that I am writing my final blogs for this internship. I truly cannot believe how quickly the semester went; twelve weeks of constant triumphs, struggles, revelations, and surprises. I can say without a doubt that I learned a lot, and on so many subjects! After this semester, I can now hold my own in conversations about public history, the NEH, grant writing, Sanford history, and the Public History Center. To be sure, I’m not an expert, but I now have a grasp of so many ideas and topics that I otherwise would not have considered.

To give a brief overview of my last ten days in the internship. The first order of business was to get a budget worked out. I met with Kristin Wetherbee of the UCF College of Arts and Humanities. She is a budgeting whiz and the college’s departments turn to her for the final submission of the grant applications. I met with her to describe our project and all of the components. Within a few quick minutes of explanation, she whipped up a shining and precise budget. Before meeting with her, I had read over the NEH’s budget instructions and tried to grasp the basic terms and categories. It was all for naught. To this day, I’m still as befuddled by the budgeting as I was (let’s not forget, my love of history is balanced by an equal disdain for mathematics). Fortunately, Kristin knew what she was doing. Factoring percentages of the contributing faculty’s salaries, allotting money for graduate student project team members, and figuring out a number for our consultant’s travel, housing, and meals, quickly enough Kristin came up with an amount that we should request from the NEH. Even more impressive, she came up with money from a number of sources on our end to demonstrate that the PHC was kicking in almost half to the total project cost. I was relived to get that part of the application out of the way. I was also glad to be able to leave it to the experts.

In the last week I also finalized the project team. As of this moment, three of our four humanities consultants have sent their letters of commitment. On Friday I spoke with the museum consulting firm Remer and Talbott about coordinating our NEH project and they too seemed receptive and interested in the project. After I submitted a completed first draft to Dr. Beiler and Bethany, an office assistant in the History Department, and they both made some revisions to the grant application. Now, through our joint efforts, the application is looking better than ever. I sent the draft to Barbara Bays at the NEH for additional review. Looking back with everything winding down, it is a satisfying feeling to see everything come together.