Our staff collaborate and work closely with students every term. Through work-study placements, fellowships, volunteering, internships, course credits and so much more we welcome students from middle school and above to develop their museum and archival skills with us. Over the decades we've had many students take the lessons they learned at The History Center to new museum communities, this is just to highlight a few of our more recent student workers and interns who have continued to pursue museum and archival studies beyond their time at The History Center.

Ian Donahue (Ithaca College, B.A. History 2024) joined The History Center as a student worker from Ithaca College this past spring. His main project was completing research for our Irish American Heritage Month web page and a public program highlighting Irish history and immigrant stories in Tompkins County. Ian was recently hired as the Visitor Services Coordinator for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

Melanie Jalbert (Cornell University, B.Sc. Information Science, Systems, and Technology exp. 2026) joined The History Center as a student worker in October 2022. Her first term with us she completed Spanish translations for a number of our youth activity booklets. Melanie later worked on a number of our Oral Histories through the 2022 Preserving Community Oral Histories grant from the American Historical Association, completed the Finding Aid for our Deaf History in Tompkins County collection, and in the past term has worked extensively to improve the accessibility of our website through writing alt-text for all images at thehistorycenter.net. After her first year working with us, Melanie accepted a second student worker position as a Document Conversion Assistant for Cornell University Student Disability Services. This summer Melanie is interning at the Smithsonian Office of the Under Secretary for Education as a Claudine K. Brown Education intern. These internships are intended to increase the participation of students who are under-represented in the education and museum leadership field. Interns experience opportunities in the central education office and collaborate with offices, museums, and research centers throughout the Smithsonian Institution where they help to create, develop, and disseminate innovative educational programs and resources at the Smithsonian, online, in the classroom, and in communities.

Claire Deng (Cornell University, B.A. English Language & Literature 2022) began volunteering at The History Center in January 2021 as an undergraduate at Cornell University. Over the following terms Claire dove headfirst into projects discovering, documenting, preserving early Asian and Asian American history in Ithaca and Tompkins County. Her collaborations with us culminated in the Asai Family exhibit, and the Cultural Fabric of Tompkins County: Where did families come from? Included as part of the 2022 reCOUNT: Facing our Census exhibit. She additionally accessioned two collections into our archives: the Tompkins County Asian Diaspora Collection , and the Tang Family Collection. Her research earned her Cornell's 2022 Campus-Community Leadership Award. Since graduation Claire completed a one-year curatorial research fellowship at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum in Ocotillo California, and returned to Ithaca last November to work as a Collections Survey Assistant in the Kheel Center in the ILR School at Cornell.

Rebecca Doyle (Cornell University, B.A. History 2022) worked at The History Center for the 2021-2022 academic year. Contributing written content and exhibit displays for multiple exhibits including: The Art of Wampum, reCount: Facing our Census, and Unfolding: A Timeline of Sexual Assault Activism in Tompkins County. Since graduating in 2022 Rebecca has completed two museum internships, one with the Daughters of the American Revolution, and one as a Collections Intern with the National Mall in Washington D.C.. Rebecca is now working as a full-time museum technician for the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Washington D.C..

Raia Gutman (Ithaca High School 2022) began with The History Center as one of our Youth Ambassadors in 2018, conducting interviews for the oral history project "HERstory" when they were in middle school. When the pandemic hit, Raia shifted into a volunteer role with us. Coming in weekly for their final two years of high school, also joining us for two summers as a Youth Employment Services paid worker. Working to process our oral history collections, and later shifting into the archives to work on finding aids in our archives with Donna. Raia graduated from Ithaca High School in 2022, and has since been a student at Smith College. While at Smith, Raia has been working as an Accessioning Assistant in the Smith College Archives, recently completing processing and finding aids for the B'Not Esh records documenting a group of Jewish feminists active in the 1980s; and the Jane Mead von Salis papers.

It brings our staff a lot of pride to see our former interns and student workers taking lessons and inspiration from the work they completed with us at The History Center to other museum and archival spaces across the country.