30 July 2024
Five university students who joined AIT for work experience in the spring have completed their projects. AIT has been running student placement projects for several years now with the main aim of these placements from our point of view is to show how valuable our archive of interviews is.
We have done this in two ways: firstly, by asking some students to write publishable articles on a particular aspect of the archive, and then secondly by asking others to do analytical work that involves attaching attributes and keywords to interviews which could then be used by future research projects. The students’ objectives are to have some exposure to the workplace and have a discrete project that can be shown on their CVs.
Previously Published Projects
September 2022 – Yueqi Li: The UK IT Industry after World War II
June 2022 – Stephen Robertson: The challenges of being an IT manager in the 1980s
https://archivesit.org.uk/the-challenges-of-being-an-it-manager-in-the-1980s/
May 2021 – Abigail Cox podcast: The formative years of 20 high achievers in the Tech industries
Semi-competitive/bumper crop
There is a semi-competitive nature to achieving these placements; the Universities ask us to submit ideas for projects and the students choose topics that interest them. We are not always successful, but this year we had a bumper crop and ran five projects, working with students from Swansea and Manchester Universities and UCL. (Our thanks to Dr Richard Hall, Dr Duncan Wilson and Dr Sam Blaxland, respectively.)
Our students chose topics ranging from “Women in the IT industry: 1980 v 2022” to “How has management style influenced the performance of UK IT companies?” and we also ran two of the analysis projects. We will publish the articles at an appropriate point, when their themes fit in with what we are focusing on.
Positive feedback
Feedback from our students has so far been positive, and they all say they have learned something from working with us. We too have learned lessons from managing these projects, and running five in parallel this year has been challenging.
We at AIT get used to the scale of our archive, but we’ve found that it is very daunting for someone to come in cold and produce an article using it, particularly on a tight timeline. Meaningful research seems to require very close direction from us, and that’s partly why we’ve been doing the analysis projects: we will soon be able to offer the attribute database as a starting point for research that won’t require reading 250 interviews from scratch, and hopefully won’t require us to provide lists of interviews to read.
We’ve also homed in this year on a style of writing we prefer. We want our articles to be well-researched and have intellectual rigour, but we want them readable and engaging, and we are very happy to have them raise discussion points and questions. We’ve learned that students are not used to this approach and we’ve now produced a style guide which has seemed to help. But we’ve realised this year particularly that producing the kind of good quality writing we want to see requires considerable time and effort on our part in coaching, critiquing and editing – even with the style guide. Five projects is probably too many.
We’ve also discovered this year that our students were very comfortable with expressing their own views in the articles, blending them with, and finding support from, archive materials. In other words, some of them have produced something broader than just research and analysis; they have produced commentary and opinion.
Future placements
My view is that we now have two distinct strands to any future placements. We need to run perhaps one or two more data analysis projects and then we should have created enough material for a few interesting research-focused projects.
But I think there’s also value in having students express what they believe to be relevant and interesting opinions on topics that the archive suggests to them. For example, this year one of our students was intrigued by the data analysis he did on interviewees’ educational backgrounds and this led him to speculate about the relationship between poverty, family stability and educational achievement today. This seems to me to be a powerful way of demonstrating the value of our archive just as much as a ‘pure’ research project.
