This post is part of our Internship Spotlight series. For this installment, we spoke with Anya Lord (’26) about her internship experience at the Holocaust Center for Humanity.
My name is Anya Lord, and I use she/her pronouns. I have my bachelor’s in Art History with minors in History and Educational Studies from Carleton College, and I am originally from the East Coast. I am now in my second year of the Museology program and completing the Evaluation Specialization! Earlier this year, I began an internship at the Holocaust Center for Humanity after they received a significant gift from a friend of a Holocaust survivor. The Center needed someone to assess and process this donation, which consisted of many binders of scrapbook material, such as documents, photographs, and personal items that provided a snapshot of the survivor’s life during the Holocaust. My work has involved creating a donor log, conducting condition reports, and ensuring that the materials are properly documented and preserved.
I began this role in May, and I’ve stayed on through November not only to finish the project, but to also gain broader experience in the Center’s operations. Over time, my responsibilities expanded to include reorganizing items in storage, renumbering objects and transferring them into a new database, and contributing to the installation of new displays for items on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
With previous internships centered in development, I wanted a position that offered more hands-on experience with collections. My background in handling archival materials, including my undergraduate thesis on Iranian prints and my experiences in both the UW Collections Lab and Suzzallo Special Collections Lab, prepared me to take on this level of detailed, material-focused work. My participation in UW’s Jewish Studies Graduate Fellowship was able to complement my work, as well.
Working with these materials has been both meaningful and challenging. The subject matter is emotionally heavy, and reading through personal letters and documents requires a certain level of mental fortitude. I had to learn to balance the pressure of working meticulously with the awareness that it was okay to take my time. As I grew more comfortable with the staff and with the work itself, I no longer felt like I was being thrown into the deep end. The flexibility and support I received, particularly in accommodating my student schedule and recognizing the emotional weight of the material, made a significant difference. It also helps a lot that my supervisor, who is also an alum and serves on my thesis committee, has provided invaluable guidance.
This experience has shifted how I think about my professional trajectory. I had previously imagined myself staying in business-minded or administrative roles, but this internship opened me up to embracing research-based opportunities and deepening my interest in collections and exhibitions. The skills I’ve gained have strengthened my analytical abilities for my evaluative work and have shown me that I would love to find a way to integrate both collections work and evaluation in my career moving forward.