Name: Jasmine Bao
Class Year: 2022
Major: Not declared
Hometown: Basking Ridge, N.J.
Internship Organization: LITS
Job Title: LITS Digital Technology Intern
Location: Bryn Mawr College
The LITS Digital Technology Interns are split into two projects: the Great Law Project and the Palumbo Project. I am part of the Palumbo Project (also known as the Factbook Project) named after our “client” Lindsey Palumbo of the Office of Institutional Research along with another fellow LITS intern. My internship involves working closely with Bryn Mawr College’s historical factbooks. The factbooks contain valuable data and facts about the college and they date as far back as 1983 and the latest being 2003. However, there is only one physical copy per year, meaning that if anything should happen to these copies, the information in the factbooks would be gone forever. It is my job and goal as an intern to digitalize these factbooks so the information can be immortalized in the digital age and, ultimately, create a public database containing the data so the Bryn Mawr community can access and learn about the college’s history.
Being a Bryn Mawr student, of course I got excited when I saw that the college’s LITS offered an internship over the summer! Although I do not plan on pursuing or majoring in computer science or technology-centered fields, I still recognize the importance of technology and digital skills in today’s increasingly technology-dependent world. I applied for this internship because I thought it would be a good opportunity to contribute to the Bryn Mawr community, connect with other interns, build networks, learn various technology skills, and experience what it is like to be in an internship and a work-like environment.
My favorite part of this internship has definitely been connecting with my fellow interns. Every person in this internship is a passionate, kind member of the Bryn Mawr community who genuinely loves giving their knowledge, time, and effort to help others. I bonded with my coworker, Tanjuma, quickly by working closely together on the Factbook Project as well as finding out we have common interests such as drawing, watching Netflix, etc. I also became good friends with Vinty. Although Vinty is a member of the Great Law Project, the fact that we were both born in China and spoke Chinese brought us really close to each other. We even visited Philly to watch Fourth of July fireworks together (see photo)!
Because the Factbook Project is all about converting and formatting something physical into a digital form, I have become quite familiar with the scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) functions in Adobe, as well as inputting data into Excel. In almost every workplace, knowing how to extract and manipulate data is either very helpful or crucial. I encourage everyone, no matter if they are pursuing a technology-related field or not, to become familiar with data collection and editing. I am lucky and grateful that I have my colleagues here at LITS to help me when I run into trouble, so finding a reliable mentor when it comes to learning something can make all the difference!
