WWU students move forward by looking at the past

Western Washington University students are spread across the globe, getting invaluable working experience in their fields as they explore unique internship opportunities that happen to be teaching a valuable lesson about humanity’s connection across time and place. 

Most students at WWU are expected to complete a field internship by the time they finish their degrees. 

Not all departments and programs require internships, but the consensus is that completing an internship can only help a student’s education. 

Humanities: History of Culture major Arin Stewart became aware of their internship opportunity during their Introduction to Public History class last winter. Stewart wanted to be part of a team doing meaningful work, and applied for the assistant researcher position. 

“I wanted to kind of put into practice the things I've been learning and caring about for a long time,” Stewart said.

Since June 1, Stewart has been working as an assistant researcher for the Charles Mitchell and George Washington Bush Study on Reparative Action for Washington State’s Descendants of Victims of United States Chattel Slavery. 

The state of Washington commissioned the consulting group Truclusion to conduct the study, named for two notable Black residents in pre-statehood Washington, to examine the impact of slavery in the U.S., particularly in the former Washington and Oregon territories. The group will also analyze how state laws and systems have affected descendants of enslaved individuals.

The study’s findings, including Stewart’s, will be synthesized into a proposal of reparative measures, including state-level investments and recommendations for reforming harmful laws. The final proposal is due in June 2027.

As part of the study’s research team Stewart is examining newspaper and genealogical archives for any public mention of enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals, and their descendants, in Washington as far back before Washington’s statehood. 

Stewart has also been tasked with researching race-based atrocities and discriminatory policies or actions throughout Washington’s history. 

Stewart’s time at Western prepared them for this work by teaching them to understand how social perceptions are constructed, such as the commonplace perception that chattel slavery and its impacts in Washington have been historically downplayed, or outright ignored. 

During their time at WWU, Stewart had been taught that archival research is an important tool when it comes to deconstructing such harmful social perceptions built into historical narratives. 

“Kind of reading between the lines,” Stewart said, adding that the lines of history are typically written by the powerful. 

Expecting to graduate in spring 2027, Stewart will use their work from this internship to help inform their career in public history, and the discovery and retelling of marginalized histories and stories. 

“Something I care about a lot is legislative justice, and recognizing the ways that populations have been failed historically, and trying to rebuild from that,” Stewart said. “And you can't rebuild if you don't look at it, if you don't look at what's been done.” 

Across the globe, anthropology major Graham Boyd is set to embark on the Institute for Field Research’s summer 2026 archaeological field school near Karaman, Türkiye. 

Between Aug. 14 and Sept. 8, Boyd will work alongside other archaeology students from various universities under Professor Douglas Baird of the University of Liverpool. 

The field study will be conducted in partnership with the British Institute at Ankara, the capital of Türkiye. 

The study’s primary excavation site at Pınarbașı is from the Epipaleolithic era, which includes dates between 14,000 and 11,000 BCE, around the Stone Age. 

For Boyd, who only officially declared his anthropology major with an archaeology concentration at the beginning of the 2025-2026 academic year, this field study combines his archaeological studies with his interest in Middle East cultures and history. 

“I was just very interested in the Middle East, how ancient it is,” Boyd said. “I've been drawn to how old and how many different civilizations have come and gone from there.”

Most people, however, have much different connotations when archaeology comes up in conversation. 

“When I tell people I'm an archaeologist, a lot of people either think it's dinosaurs, or they start talking about aliens,” Boyd said.

Boyd wishes that people would pay more mind to the human aspect of archaeology. For Boyd, archaeology is about the history of humanity and how people have changed over time. 

“There's always some story that I think people can find relatable,” Boyd said. “People in the past are different from now, which is true, but they're still people.”

Back in the United States, history major and public history minor Matthew Ackerman is working with much more recent history, relatively speaking. 

July 1-3 marked the 163rd anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place in 1863 during the American Civil War, and claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers on both sides. 

Now, part of Ackerman’s work as an intern at the Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania is to help catalog the identities and service records of the soldiers buried in the Gettysburg National Cemetery. 

For example, Ackerman and his colleagues recently found a headstone that likely doesn’t have a soldier buried beneath it. It’s the human story that Ackerman is after, and that story is almost never told in full just by a headstone. 

Ackerman, who will start his senior year at WWU in the fall, works as an intern to the Visual Information Specialist at Gettysburg National Military Park. 

Ackerman juggles multiple projects, he said, and it's never boring.

“I could be sitting in front of the computer, just going through photographs, and my boss could come by. Now I'm on the other side of the park, and we're doing something completely different,” Ackerman said.

Thankfully, doing something completely different isn’t new to Ackerman.

When he arrived at WWU as a transfer student, Ackerman was undeclared as to his major, having been an art history major at his previous institution. Within a week of starting classes at WWU, Ackerman declared as a history major. 

In his public history minor, Ackerman has learned about everything from living history to museum work to archiving. 

Through his coursework at WWU, Ackerman has expanded his understanding of the idea that history doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and has been provided with the tools to further explore what this means in the field of history. 

“Getting into the programs here, you find out very quickly that history is not always definite,” Ackerman said. “It's a lot more human than we think of, because there were always motives behind these actions, and they didn't just come about.”

Stewart, Boyd and Ackerman are just three of many WWU students using internships to further their careers this summer. 

Spread across the globe from one another, each pursuing a different major, they are learning how interconnected the human experience truly is.