Odyssey Bound Newsletter, November 2012, St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM

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CAREER SERVICES AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE | SANTA FE | NOVEMBER 2012

INSIDE YOU’LL FIND

History, Manzanar and Sima Qian

INTERNSHIPS ARIEL INTERNS FROM THE PAST SUMMER

Interview with Rosemary Masters by Christine Kng

ADVICE ON FUNDING GRADUATE SCHOOL

Rosemary Masters, SF07 worked at the Manzanar National Historic Site under the Ariel internship program during the summer of 2006. After graduating, she went back to work with them for a summer, taught in a charter school in Chicago for one year, then moved back to do research for a book called “Children of Manzanar.” She returned to St. John’s in the fall of 2012 to begin the Eastern Classics program. Manzanar was the first of ten internment camps set up by the US government which confined Japanese Americans during World War II. Approximately 10,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed by the US government from their homes on the West coast of the United States and relocated to the camp between March and June of 1942.

GRADUATE SCHOOL PROGRAMS

Career Services Office Contact: Career Services 505-984-6066

Rosemary Masters, SF07

Fax 505-984-6167

“How did you get into archiving?” “When I was an undergraduate here, at the beginning of my sophomore year, I applied to be the student assistant to the archivist in the library. I didn’t know what it was going to entail, but it ended up being very enjoyable — all of the random papers that are generated by St. John’s end up going into the archives, as well as all the photographs. So you had old papers written by Stringfellow Barr and Richard Weigle, tutors’ writings, and to be honest, most of it was board meeting minutes… but you know, you can become interested in meeting minutes if you open your mind to them! So I became interested in board meeting minutes and filing those and figuring out what kind of thing goes where. That system in the library was already very well set up, which is very different from when I applied for the Ariel internship to work at Manzanar, which is just south of the town I grew up in in California. It was a totally different story in Manzanar. There was absolutely no system of order already in place… which was enticing, but it was also a little bit like walking into a room where a bomb had just dropped.”

Web address: www.stjohnscollege. edu/admin/SF/career.shtml AGORA: www.myinterfase.com/sjcsf/student Facebook: www.facebook.com/sjcsf careerservices Email: careerservices@sjcsf.edu Office located in the basement of Weigle Hall, Room 13

Office Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. or by appointment Career Services Staff: Margaret Odell Director Barbara Lucero Sand Assistant Director Chelsea Allen Internship Coordinator Christine Kng Publications Editor Allen Matsika Research Assistant Melissa Latham-Stevens Art Director

“Did you know that when you were going into it?” “No, I had no idea. I actually applied for the internship because working in the archives here sparked an interest in it, and I wanted to explore that as a potential career. I like history, and I like organizing things. So I talked to one of the people who worked in Manzanar and they said, “Yeah, we could definitely host you as an intern here… especially with the Ariel stipend, that really helps.” They also said that I would be working with their archivist, and I thought, “That’s great, I’ll learn all these new things!” But when I got there, it was quite a different story. The person in charge of the library and the archives had just gotten there, and he wasn’t a librarian or an archivist by trade. He’s still doing that job – and he does an excellent job – but it was also a huge learning experience for him, to figure out how to do all that. So the first day I walked in and they said, “Well, here are these boxes and here are these drawers which have topics assigned to them; can you just file this stuff into these drawers and then enter it all into a database on a computer?” My first reaction was, “Well, great, I’m going to spend this entire summer entering things into a database, this is going to be so boring.” I opened the drawers and started digging into some of the content of the folders, and that was when I realized that for about 70% of the files, the labels didn’t correspond at all to what was inside. Nobody realized that. It was the Manzanar reference files. So Continued on page 2

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