American Geographical Society, Brooklyn, NY
This summer, I worked as a Scholar-Intern at the American Geographical Society (AGS) in Brooklyn, N.Y. A non-profit founded in 1851, AGS is the oldest professional geographical organization in the United States. Its mission, broadly speaking, is to advance and promote geography and geographical literacy in business, government, science, and education. In practice, those goals take various forms, and as such, my duties as an intern were multifaceted.
My main role was what drew me to the internship in the first place—writing. I knew I wanted to be able to consistently write articles on topics I found interesting, and since AGS’s newsletters and blogs needed fresh content several times a week, I had plenty of opportunities to make that happen. The main AGS blog, UBIQUE (which means “everywhere” in Latin), has two main regularly scheduled publications: Map of the Week and Company Spotlights. The former is fairly self-explanatory. Every Wednesday, the Map of the Week features a particularly interesting map or set of maps, ranging from visualizations of endangered species migrations to depictions of socioeconomic status in urban and rural regions of the U.S. My own articles in the section were centered on a few general themes that allowed me to tie my own interests into my writing: many of them looked to unpack ongoing or newly published scientific studies (which was also the case in my work for Connect2Conserve, AGS’s sustainability-focused blog), while one piece had to do with LGBT activism, and another plotted geographic references in Willie Nelson songs. Because AGS only has three full-time employees, the summer interns were given a wide range of responsibilities, but a large amount of leeway in how we addressed them. I enjoyed writing for the Map of the Week section the most because I had a lot of freedom in choosing the topics of my articles. The main goal of Map of the Week—to raise awareness of geographical concepts by highlighting interesting maps—was easily accomplished because of the huge amount of potential material I had available. Geography has such an intrinsically broad scope that I was always able to carve out my own niches and explore areas that captured my interest.
UBIQUE also puts out a more specialized section, Company Spotlights, which features companies (often non-profits) that operate in the geospatial industry or whose work otherwise relates to geography. Knowing next to nothing about the world of geospatial data and technology going in, I quickly found that much of it can be very opaque if you have never been exposed to it beforehand. In putting together my Spotlights, I tried to become familiar with one area in particular: the quickly expanding field of geospatial data. I ended up profiling two companies that both make it part of their mission to democratize access to geospatial data, and found I was drawn to the idea of opening up access to a continuously growing field rather than try to monopolize it.
I noticed a similar mindset at play in DailyGeo, AGS’s free newsletter (and most popular publication), which is delivered digitally to over 1,500 geography teachers every morning. Each DailyGeo contains three 100-word news stories from that day, written by the interns and illustrated by maps, as well as a geographical trivia question, the answer to the previous day’s GeoQuestion. Part of why the newsletter is useful to teachers is its potential as a daily activity in their classes: the way news stories are illustrated with maps is a testament to the ubiquitous nature of geography, and the trivia element helps build curiosity and general knowledge in students at any grade level. For me, writing short summaries of full news articles, which often incorporated up to five different sources, forced me to develop strategies for keeping my writing concise and thus helped me become a better and more effective writer.
DailyGeo is the most prominent of the resources AGS offers for geography teachers, but it’s not the only one. Aside from fellowship programs and other professional development opportunities, AGS invites teachers from all over the nation to its annual academic symposium, Geography 2050, an event designed to bring together leaders from academia, government, industry, and the social sector. I helped create promotional material for this year’s symposium, “Borders and a Borderless World,” a task that involved writing press releases announcing the keynote speakers (such as former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power) and award recipients. Coordinating the logistics for a conference like Geography 2050, which will have several hundred attendees, is an enormous job for an office with only three full-time employees, so I took on some of the load, advertising on AGS’s social media and helping organize information for the event programs.
Most meaningful for me, though, was a new educational initiative that I was able to take the lead on over the summer. One of the AGS semi-academic publications, FOCUS on Geography, is published online in a highly visual format that we wanted to start making available for AP Human Geography teachers to use as part of their curriculum. Teachers without access to smartboards would be unable to display the articles for their students without a way to convert them into a hard-copy format to distribute for maximum accessibility. We decided to try to create versions of the FOCUS in PowerPoint, with images on the slides and the majority of the text in the notes below, and print the presentations out to be used as hand-outs. Because the FOCUS articles come in three different styles—feature articles, photo essays, and GeoQuizzes—we needed multiple strategies for breaking the articles down into digestible slide-based versions. The GeoQuizzes, which were assembled in a simple multiple-choice question/answer flow, appeared especially difficult to handle because of the website design which united the questions with pictures of maps alongside them. I created a step-by-step guide to converting GeoQuizzes into almost identical PowerPoints that preserved the flow of the quizzes as much as possible. The hard-copy FOCUS articles will be sent, free of charge, to the same audience that receives DailyGeo, hopefully making an ever bigger impact on teachers and students.
Though AGS’s small size sometimes meant that I juggled a lot of projects at the same time, it also allowed me to establish personal relationships with both AGS staff and my fellow interns, making connections that I came to value highly alongside the professional skills I developed. Producing articles on a frequent and consistent basis has sharpened by ability to write under a deadline, giving me the skills for which I was initially attracted to the job. Meanwhile, the work I did over the summer will connect closely with much of what I do at Williams, including journalistic pursuits as an editor of The Williams Record and work with the educational equity non-profit Matriculate. The connections to my own interests, however, and potential career possibilities in education, I could not have foreseen. I am deeply grateful to the ’68 Center for Career Exploration and the Class of 1972 for this opportunity.
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