Elon’s Study USA program has allowed Addison Anderson to live and intern in Washington, D.C. this summer, a dream for the history and sociology double major.
Addison Anderson ’28 is a self-described “history girl,” so she has always wanted to live in and experience, Washington, D.C. Now her summer internship and Elon’s Study USA Program is making it possible.
“I was going to battlefields with my dad at 5 years old. So even as a young child, I always thought history lived in DC,” said Anderson, who is double majoring in history and sociology.
Anderson is interning with the Lincoln Archives Digital Project, a public service initiative aimed at increasing the digital accessibility of records related to Abraham Lincoln. Her role is to help digitize Civil War draft cards of the American Indian Home Guard, a group of Native Americans who fought with the Union Army. The information collected by Anderson will then be given to the Cherokee Nation so they can use it for their own purposes.
As a rising sophomore, this is Anderson’s first internship, and the intensive workload has surprised but excited her.
“Sometimes you think you’re just using a scanner to take fancy pictures, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on the back end for each picture you see of the end product,” said Anderson. “The average person may go onto some database for this type of digital records and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a quick picture,’ but each picture takes me a good couple of minutes just for each side.”
Getting to achieve her dream of living in Washington, D.C., specifically through Elon’s Study USA program, Anderson says she is in a constant state of “awe.”
“There’s these moments where I’ll be working and I look around and realize I’m in the National Archives,” said Anderson, “I’m sitting next to professors and researchers and down the hall from the National Archivist and there’s this amazing feeling and this full circle moment of accomplishing this dream that I’ve had since I was 5 or 6 years old. It’s very indescribable.”
Internships are one of the five Elon Experiences – students are expected to complete at least two before graduation. Anderson, after just completing her first year, is getting a strong start. She chose Elon for the Honors Program and the ability to get close mentorship without breaking the bank.
“Elon created the best environment for me where I could get mentorship programs and great opportunities that would open up for me through those connections,” she said. “It was also financially feasible for me. Other schools were like $70,000 a year, and that was just not in the cards for me.”
Now that Anderson has experience with an internship, she feels more prepared for her next three years at Elon and for more internships to come. She hopes to eventually work in archiving, museums or higher education.
“This internship felt like it was a way for me to connect to both the history and the people who preserve it in a really unique way that I wouldn’t be able to do in other places,” she said.