When A Lot of People Will See Your Work…

By Autumn Neal

The Edgar Snow Symposium was held here in Kansas City the weekend of October 16-18. The initial goal was to launch edgarsnowproject.org at the symposium so I aimed to have it completed by October 16th. I did the final edits the night of the 15th and the site was presented on the 17th. I didn’t attend the symposium so, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see any reactions to it.

That’s where this project is different from anything else that I’ve done in my academic career. The papers that I’ve written have only been seen by the faculty or GTA’s who were in charge of the course or other classmates in cases where you post to a forum. This project isn’t just something that was going to be read, graded, and then put away to be forgotten about. This is a website that is going to be online forever or at least it will be available for people to see a lot longer than, say, a term paper would be. I felt a lot of pressure to create a quality product because I knew that a lot of people were going to be seeing the site and that some of these people were going to know a lot of things about Edgar Snow and his life.

I see this as a positive challenge though, because now I have experience creating something that fits into the bigger picture of my career as opposed to just receiving a grade for a course. I feel like I have a better understanding of what it will be like once I start working in my career. Knowing that other people will be seeing your work forces you to work in a different way. Because of this, I now think that all students should do at least one internship so that they can see what it’s like to know that your work will be seen by a wider audience.

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