National Endowment for the Humanities provides paid internships for Geneseo students throughout the year

SUNY Geneseo has announced the decision to partner with several New York state colleges to offer paid internships for history majors over the summer. The internships will provide a variety of opportunities for Geneseo students through working with local historians for projects pertaining to town histories.

Michael Oberg, a professor of history as well as history department internship coordinator, spoke on the many internship opportunities for history students to come in the next couple of years with a wide range of variety.

Oberg explained, “The National Endowment for the Humanities provided paid internships for 21 Geneseo students that will run out this semester [Fall 2022]. And we have a project beginning in the summer of 2023 and it will continue into the summer of 2024 and summer 2025.”

For paid internships to exist, Oberg said, “The center’s director, Dr. Joel Helfrich, has [written] grants because we want to provide paid internships for the simple reason that many students can’t afford to do a summer’s worth of work without being paid. And unfortunately, most internships in history have been unpaid over the years.”

Oberg and other history departments are trying to provide more paid internships for history students; for example, “The local history center is running a project at the head of six other colleges where we will provide 50 paid internships for students who wish to work with local historians across the state on projects tied into celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which is coming up in 2026.”

For students to apply for these various internships, they will need to access Handshake to search for the many opportunities in Geneseo.

There will be “25 students this summer and 25 next summer, and these are divided up amongst the seven colleges that are involved. And those seven colleges are [SUNY Geneseo], Conesus, Cornell, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Potsdam, Brooklyn College, and Stony Brook. And each one of these internships we will divide them up equally amongst the seven schools which pays $4,800 for 150 hours of work, so they’re generous stipends,” he said.

“[For these internships] we want students who are of all [History] majors, but we do want students who have some demonstrated experience and aptitude in history,” Oberg said.

With such development, students can access a wide range of internships in different aspects of history field.

Projects that students can work on cover a variety of topics. “We have a student with an interest in archaeology, who was helping to map and plot the graves in a cemetery that had fallen badly into disrepair in the town of Bristol. We’ve had students investigating a railroad crash early in the 20th century. There’s an article on it in the Geneseo Scene.”

He points out, “New York State has a law that requires every municipality no matter how small to have a government appointed historian, and Connecticut copied New York’s law, but otherwise no one has anything like this. So, there’s this huge infrastructure for doing history and colleges have traditionally ignored these local historians. So, this grant will also be paying the town historians a little bit of money to incentivize their work with students.”

With such a large-scale project involving over 1,600 historians, Oberg hopes that the college continues to be more involved in funding.

“What would be great [is if] the college would put some money behind it. All our money is coming from grants. Geneseo has provided some matching funds, but they’re not providing much help beyond that. So, we’re hopeful that with the success of this program, we can get the college to come on board and really provide us some funding to allow this project to grow even more.”

Oberg left the interview off with, “When you teach people that they are themselves a force in history. You really connect them in a way to their community that I think few of us are connected—they understand where they are in time and space and why their community is the way it is. I think that is sort of a fundamental first step in creating a more just and equitable society.”