Ellerhorst handled the organization’s social media pages, helped organize International Coffee Hours at UD, developed membership recruitment strategies and reached out to potential organizational partners. In May 2023, she was elected to their board as communications secretary.
Ellerhorst later landed a summer internship with PBS’ Public Media Connect in Cincinnati in 2022, documenting her experiences as a communication and production intern. However, her most recent internship with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., combined all of her academic scholarship, talents, and interests.
During her internship, which began in summer 2023 and was extended until May 2024, one project in particular tied together all of her disparate academic concentrations, Ellerhorst said. Working with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Ellerhorst edited and helped film a video about Kazakh artisans who had appeared at the 2023 Folklife Festival, and — courtesy of her dual major in Russian studies — found herself doing her own subtitle translations for the interviews conducted in Russian.
“There I was, engaging interculturally, for a public-facing institution that is a large set of museums, using something I learned in the journalism minor and my other experiences in the language I was studying,” she said.
“So for me, that was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, it's all going to be okay,’ ” she said. “That was the moment where I thought, ‘Okay, I think things are going to work out.’ ”
Article by Erin Tanner
Photo credit Jordan Rosales and CET/ThinkTV