Amy Connolly

Amy is a high school senior who worked with the PRISM Outreach team as a summer intern. She reflects on her experience.

Education is one of the greatest gifts a person can receive. It is a remarkable experience to come into a new environment and to learn new ideas and processes. Learning can also create a new understanding and appreciation for life. My summer intern at JRP gave me this gift.

I am so pleased that I was allowed the chance to come and work with the PRISM project. While I was here I learned many new computer skills. The most I had ever done before I worked here was type school reports and write e-mails. Now I can work with Adobe Photoshop, Spin Photo, and Dreamweaver, all computer programs. It was amazing to me that I was someone who occasionally visited websites, and now I was actually MAKING websites. It was an awesome feeling of accomplishment.

I also learned a lot about the artifacts with which I worked. My job required me to go to the KU Anthropology Museum to take pictures of artifacts from the Artic region, circa 1800’s. I began to learn about the Inuit culture and what they did to survive. Something that I thought was particularly interesting was what they used for a source of light and heat. They would make blubber lamps, which would be a shallow stone bowl, and they would fill the lamp with seal blubber. They would then have a moss wick inside the blubber and light the wick. This would emit a source of smokeless light and heat. This was just one of the many things I learned about Inuit culture.

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