Sophielab Gives Students Media Experience
Six Tulane undergraduates spent the spring semester immersed in an integrative internship program to learn how technology can create a community of like-minded scholars. The interdisciplinary projects included blogging, Web development, programming, digital archiving and designing interactive exhibits.
Senior Dana Hauck and other undergraduate students work as interns at Sophielab, learning to develop digital projects from Web pages to blogs to interactive exhibits. (Photo from Newcomb College Institute)
Sponsored by the Newcomb College Institute, Sophielab interns are paired with Newcomb Fellows or staff members to complete a digital media project over the course of a semester.
While the program is driven by faculty-proposed projects, it is the students who bring their digital visions to fruition. Junior Dana Hauck worked in conjunction with French professor Felicia McCarren to create a digital archive and Web page for the Morocco Group, a Moroccan culture organization on campus that is open to faculty, staff members, students and the community.
“From the professor's view, this program is a win-win situation: working closely with a student and also getting to realize a project that might have otherwise taken years to get to. From the student's view, the project allowed her to see another facet of her professor's research, one also very close to her own,” McCarren says.
Hauck, a French major, found an opportunity to expand her professional skills through the program. “Before my Sophielab internship, I had never had a job that made me feel like I was actually applying what I was majoring in, but my digital archiving project gave me the opportunity to not only utilize my French language skills but also learn how to apply this knowledge to the world of technology.”
At a Sophielab open house in April, an exhibition of this semester's projects ranged from revamping the Nadine Vorhoff Library Web page to the creation of an interactive map and timeline of the original Newcomb College campus on Washington Avenue.
Sophielab and the internship program are made possible by the Collat Family and its support of the Collat Media Project.
Aidan Smith is external affairs officer for the Newcomb College Institute.
