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Y E S! Youth Engagement through Science (YES!) is a 12-week career immersion internship program for rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors from high schools in the Washington, D.C., region. The YES! program, which runs from June to November, accepts 18 students. During the program students get practical experience through a hands-on science internship with Smithsonian science staff, take exclusive behind-thescenes tours and field trips, attend creative studio workshops, participate in a college preparatory program, and create an outreach project for communicating science to peers. SG’s 2015 YES! students were Lisa Haang Lee, a senior at Bell HS and Luis Estrada, a sophomore at Benjamin Banneker. Under the tutelage of Supervisory Horticulturist Monty Holmes, Lisa and Luis rotated through various Greenhouse Nursery Operations but primarily worked in the production section assisting with seasonal crops. They sowed seeds, fabricated mum baskets, pinched poinsettias, and learned about all the facets of greenhouse/nursery production including water quality, soil types, photo periods, etc. This was the fourth year that SG hosted YES! Students.
E D U C AT I O N + C O L L E C T I O N S
Melinda Allen, a graduate student working on a Master’s in Library Science at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, joined Archives of American Gardens for a part-time internship during the winter semester. Melinda digitized historic letters from AAG’s W. Atlee Burpee & Co. Collection for the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Once the letters were uploaded on the Transcription Center site, ‘digital volunteers’ were invited to transcribe them to make it easier to search them online.
Thuvia Martin of Concordia University, an Educational and Outreach intern, focused on creating lesson plans and making resources accessible to educators.
Sara Batts was the 4th graduate research assistant from the Smithsonian-George Mason Master of Arts in the History of Decorative Arts program that SG has hosted in as many years.
ENI D A . HAUPT F EL LOW
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Janie Askew was the 2015 Enid A. Haupt Fellow in Horticulture. Janie researched SG’s large collection of funerary wire frames as well as photographs and ephemera in the Archives of American Gardens related to funerary floral arrangements from the Victorian era for her topic, “Framing Grief: Nineteenth-Century Funeral Flower Frames.”