Week 8/9: Post-Milton and Presentation

    Hello, my name is Hiram Davila. I am in my second year at UCF in the History Master's program, and I am extremely excited to share some information about my internship this semester. My current research interests regard the early modern Spanish Empire, particularly the Spanish Inquisition. This blog will be acting as my journal week-by-week as I intern with the city of Orlando and Greenwood Cemetery throughout the Fall 2024 semester.

    Here I am two weeks after I said I will not be late against on one of the internship posts. This time, it is not my fault! As I mentioned in my last post, Florida was hit by Hurricane Milton. For some parts of the state, especially the area I grew up in in Tampa Bay, there was pretty devastating damage. However, I am relieved that my family and UCF/Orlando was spared from a lot of long-lasting damages.

    My last post I also mentioned that I would be heading to South Carolina, which I did end up doing. The traffic from Orlando to Santee, South Carolina was horrendous. The trip is usually around five and a half hours, but it took a little over 9 hours on the day that I left. The spot with the worst traffic was in Jacksonville. I was in the Jacksonville, passing UNF for about 15 miles and it took me almost an hour and a half to get through those 15 miles.

    I was gracious that my family was offered a place to stay in South Carolina by people who owned a hotel in Santee. They actually homed many Floridians, especially those who had people with special needs (my sister is autistic and we met them through Special Olympics). Another very lucky element of the trip is that Santee is located about an hour away from Charleston and my best friend who I met at UCF recently moved there to start working for Boeing. I ended up staying at his house for most the trip, which was a much needed reprieve from my work at UCF and to take my mind off the hurricane. While at his house and the hotel, I was unable to properly set up my computer, which did not allow me to do work for any assignments, projects, and more importantly for this post, my internship. 

    I returned to Orlando on Sunday night (10/13). On Tuesday, I finished up on the presentation I mentioned in my previous post and met with Sarah Boye, my supervisor, who helped me wrinkle out some oddly worded bits, and also helped give me affirmation that the PowerPoint I created was sufficient.

    I ended up leading the VHP Student Service-Learning on Thursday afternoon (10/17), which I think went extremely well. I was very nervous and I did mess up in the beginning (I forgot what the RICHES acronym was), but I continued with the presentation. I know that Sarah recorded the session for perhaps future uses at VHP-trainings to try and streamline the processes a bit easier. 

    This was my first experience talking directly with undergraduates as an "educator" or as an authoritative figure. I am currently a TA for a class and while I am an authoritative figure, no students have come to my office hours and I have not talked with many of them in class. This was the first time that I was the major focus of the presentation, created the presentation, and was available to ask questions if they had any (of course, with Sarah's help as well). 

    All in all, I think everything went well. I also got some good tips regarding the A/V logs and transcripts that I will be using for my creation of those material with the Greenwood Cemetery materials.