In the fall of 2021, undergraduate students in the Humanities Engagement Scholars (HES) program shared their desire for support when applying for internships, jobs, and scholarships in order to be prepared for work outside of academia. During the 2021-2022 academic year, the program provided students with tools for their professional journeys. For example, Ready, Set, Resume Review: An Introduction to HES and a Resume Workshop with UF’s Career Connections Center focused on teaching students how to showcase their humanities skills on their resumes. This event highlighted the differences between a resume and a CV. HES also hosted a virtual discussion with UF’s Hispanic-Latinx Affairs PODEMOS program about Ashley Ford’s novel Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir (2021). Many students related to the book’s themes of family and trauma.
HES programming extends far beyond curated events. As part of participation in the program, students complete courses in the humanities. They also attend and participate in the planning, preparation, and/or execution of virtual and in-person humanities events. Student Leah Rogers attended India: Anglophone Literature and Religion, one of the Center for Humanities and Public Sphere’s Synergies series events. Rogers was fascinated by the ways in which Meghna Sapui (Ph.D. Candidate, English) and Venu Mehta (Ph.D. Candidate, Religion) associated food with an edible empire of cultural significance and considered how “certain foods and food groups are adopted and confronted with opposition.”
Several HES members participated in volunteer activities. Julianna Panton, for instance, helped organize the Blackness 360 series, sponsored by the UF Power Lab, a group focused on supporting student success through research, mentoring, and critical pedagogy, and the University of Florida Black Affairs. As part of Panton’s duties, she added Dr. Mandisa Haarhoff’s (University of Cape Town) biography to the Blackness 360 series’ registration page and handled correspondence with attendees and speakers.
Three HES students, Brian Marra (History), Isabella Kemp (International and German Studies) and Christine Taylor (English), were paired with graduate student mentors, Cristovão Nwachukwu (English), Noah Mullens (English), and Lucy Xie (Department for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) according to their interests. The mentees enjoyed the support they received from their mentors. Marra, for example, received helpful advice in revising his graduate school application. Mullens helped Kemp navigate the professional world while she was interning in Tallahassee, and Taylor received assistance from Xie in preparing her resume.
Working in the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere exposed interns from the Active Learning Program to professional skills, such as researching themes and speakers for programs, assisting with social media advertising, designing and moderating events. Designing a Multimedia Language Access Handbook for North Central Florida collaboration between Dr. Laura Gonzales (UF Department of English) and Robin Lewy (Rural Women’s Health Project) highlighted the language diversity that exists in North Central Florida while providing valuable resources to agencies and organizations that support non-English speakers. The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere celebrated the achievements of HES graduating students Alexander Kanfer, Julianna Panton, and Christine Taylor at the end of the 2021-22 academic year.