A week with TORCH
TORCH welcomes micro-interns regularly and we are delighted to host so many enthusiastic and helpful people who get involved in many aspects of what we do on a day to day basis.
We were very happy when a recent micro-intern wrote a blog about her week with us in June 2023.
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect coming into my Micro-Internship with TORCH. Although I’d read the description of the tasks we might be carrying out, and I’d already briefly come across TORCH in my various interactions with some of its networks, it is always hard to understand what any role will look like before you step into it. Thankfully, the team at TORCH were very welcoming and I was able to get started quickly on my tasks.
During the week, I combined these administrative tasks with meetings with the TORCH team members and attending panels from a conference TORCH was organising during the week, Comics and/as resistance. Many of the tasks were maintaining TORCH’s website – which perhaps doesn’t sound the most glamorous, but allowed me to get some insight into all of the exciting upcoming and past events on the website. It was also a reminder that web accessibility, including alt text for all images, is essential to any website. I also met the lovely members of the TORCH team who gave me an insight into what TORCH does, its various programmes and plans for the future. I found it interesting to learn more about the interdisciplinary work going on in Oxford as I’ve spent the last 3 years much more involved in my own degree and faculty. I’ve often felt that the high level of subject specialisation in further and higher education in the UK (as well as lack of funding for humanities) discourages us to work across disciplines, so it is great to see TORCH stepping in to fill this space.
I especially enjoyed writing transcripts for two Book at Lunchtime talks. I hadn’t come across Book at Lunchtime before but am now very keen to attend one during term time – I wish I’d known about it before! I transcribed two talks, on two historical books from very different time periods: on Swami Vivekananda in the 19th century and political thought in the 16th and 17th centuries. Neither were topics I had much experience in, but spending several hours transcribing them allowed me to really dig into the details of what the speakers were saying – all experts in a relevant area – well as to discover more of the background about the topics.
Oxford recently released a report on the value of humanities for graduates and whilst I strongly feel that the value of education should not lie solely in its benefits for the world of work, this was nonetheless reassuring to read as a soon-to-be humanities graduate who does still need a job! My week as a Micro-Intern at TORCH underlined the innovation the humanities can offer us as well as valuable insight into roles in academic support.
A second year Classics student.
