ELHS students, Jessica Feng, Aaron Knapp, Justin Korineck, Karthik Bolineni, Jack Chen, Astrid Phillips-Geeza, and Nathaniel Scott, applied and got accepted to intern at the EL Public Library to work on town history online digital exhibits for the EL archives over the course of the summer.
While one group worked on analyzing EL data related to demographics (like race and gender trends) over time, the other group mapped the town’s boundaries throughout history. Starting in the beginning of June, the internship lasted 6 weeks. The students will present their findings at the East Lyme Public Library, open to the public during the winter lecture series.
“It was honestly really fun, I learned so much about data analysis, and it was so rewarding to create an exhibit of our own findings that are completely new,” junior Jessica Feng said.
Throughout the internship, interns went to the EL library Tuesdays and Thursdays for three hours. For the first two weeks, the interns mostly looked at data from censuses from 1790-1840.
“We had to look for data sets ourselves and in some cases make them from existing data because research about our town’s demographics had not been done before,” Feng said.
Interns then charted the trends in population of different groups and relationships, such as the ratio of men to women in EL over time. Interns moved data from various sources into a spreadsheet then analyzed and charted. In the last week, they shifted to focus on creating the exhibit in which they will showcase their findings. An example of their findings would be the fact that over time, the average age of people in EL rose. Students also had to take into account the various biases data collectors in the 1800s had, for example, the data lacked information on the Native American and Black populations, so students had to find said data elsewhere or extrapolate it.
“It was a lot of comparing data, but it was honestly really interesting stuff. We learned a ton about the history of East Lyme,” junior Karthik Bolineni said.
The East Lyme Public Library received a grant from CT Humanities to sponsor the internship.
“Some people are even continuing to go back and look into other interests they found related to our projects. Overall, everyone found it to be a really cool experience,” Feng said.
