Micro-internships at TORCH

TORCH welcomes students for Micro-internships regularly. We had the great pleasure of hosting five students in March. 

Reflections on my TORCH Micro-internship in March 2023

I joined TORCH for a one-week micro-internship in March 2023 with relatively low expectations. While I looked forward to joining a hub for multidisciplinary research, I also anticipated a heavy workload consisting of obscure, monotonous, and overwhelmingly dull tasks. I could not have been more wrong. The friendly and welcoming team at TORCH went above and beyond my expectations, making my internship a highly rewarding experience. Working at TORCH helped me to grasp the complex functioning of our university and to navigate its plethora of institutions, organisations and stakeholders.

Excitingly, TORCH allowed me to contribute to the behind-the-scenes work going into one of the largest University of Oxford websites. I was not only introduced to the Mosaic web design platform, but also gained valuable web governance skills by using Silktide, a form of intermediary software to spot issues on the TORCH website. While I was identifying, removing or replacing spelling mistakes and broken links, I began to appreciate why and to what extent details matter in website design.

In addition, I got a taste of the impact and output of TORCH by subtitling both a “Book at Lunchtime” session and a lecture by the Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed. Improving the accessibility of this content stimulated me to reflect on the special needs of some website users, and on how to best accommodate them. Moreover, learning more about structuralist views of urbanisation (“Paris and the Parasite”) and listening to Mykhed’s moving account of Ukrainian culture under the influence of the Russian invasion was thought-provoking. These TORCH events allowed me to learn, delve deeper into intellectual debates in the Humanities and widen my horizons.

My personal highlights of the week were shadowing several TORCH TEAMS meetings and exploring TORCH’s different divisions. The embedment of the interns into the TORCH team seemed natural, and I only encountered friendly faces. I really enjoyed working in an environment that encouraged independent learning, while also providing feedback and guidance whenever necessary.

I would thoroughly recommend this micro-internship to any student willing to gain an understanding of the administrative side of working in Higher Education.

Jan (History)

My internship experience at TORCH

I recently completed at week-long Web Accessibility and Content Internship with TORCH during week 10 of Hilary term, 2023. This was a wonderfully insightful experience, and I’m very happy to have come away with a better understanding of the steps that can be taken to make content accessible to all, and of the work that TORCH does to encourage interdisciplinary research and outreach in the Humanities.

We began by completing training in TORCH’s content and accessibility checking software, Silktide, so that we could understand the edits needed and how to make these on the Mosaic-based website. These tasks involved checking and amending broken links, checking for spelling mistakes, resizing images for quicker load-times, and my personal favourite, adding Alt text to images to allow for better reading by screen-readers.

This was interesting and satisfying work – seeing the changes I made affect and improve the website real-time was rewarding, because I could see the evidence of my contribution during the internship. I enjoyed being able to learn about accessibility standards, and then be able to put this into practice and actually improve content.

Another task was making transcripts to subtitle TORCH YouTube videos. This rather time-consuming process was made enjoyable by the large variety of videos there were to choose from, on some niche but fascinating topics. For instance, I transcribed a video from the ‘Sleep and the Rhythms of Life’ Network, which was an interdisciplinary look at how light affects sleep, and how architecture can reflect on this. This was a great way for me to observe the value of TORCH’s interdisciplinary goals in action – I came away from this task with a brand-new, multi-faceted view on sleep and light in architecture, and having done my bit to improve its accessibility.

During the week, we also had the invaluable opportunity to speak to people at TORCH about their work and current projects. Here I enjoyed learning about how TORCH goes about supporting the variety of projects and Networks currently on at one time. It was great to see a behind-the-scenes perspective on what keeps TORCH running smoothly through sitting in on meetings and friendly one-on-one chats.

Sometimes, doing a degree in a Humanities subject can feel a bit like wishful thinking, or a bit like there’s an elephant labelled ‘employability’ in the room. But speaking to the people at TORCH about the varied, exciting, and important work they’re doing to support the Humanities has left me with a renewed optimism for the potential this area has as a career. It is clear to me that there are many roles, outside of academia, that capitalise on an appreciation for the humanities – and that are essential to projects that have a real impact on ordinary people’s lives.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my internship at TORCH and have come away with invaluable content-management and web accessibility skills, and better informed about TORCH’s goals and projects, as well as careers supporting Humanities.

I am very grateful for the warm welcome from everyone at TORCH and the wonderful support throughout the internship!

Emily (Philosophy and Linguistics)