Out West Student Blog

“When you’re delving deep into understanding something, it can be challenging to make sure it’s accessible to anyone on the outside,” says Max Vilgalys. “But thanks to the input from our mentor and the other employees, we’re getting better at explaining our results.”

“Long after we left the archive, my fingers still felt tingly,” writes summer intern Miranda Vogt, “I couldn’t stop thinking about how much history I had leafed through.”

Juliana Chang is interning at Heyday, a non-profit publishing house based in Berkeley that specializes in books on California. This means books ranging from nonfiction recountings of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to a field guide to edible plants in the Bay Area to a collection of Native American folktales.

Julia Anderson, ‘17, has been tasked with writing a “historical structure report” on Alcatraz Island’s electric shop, which dates back to the 1860s. But first she has to navigate past a very territorial mother seagull.