I was intrigued during the visit to special collections when the librarians brought up the idea of being able to dig into the profiles of Colby College Alums, all the way back to the 19th centuries. As someone who has always found an interest in the study of people, I was fascinated with the thought of being able to have a better comprehension of the lives of Colby College students of the past. My goal is to be able to capture the community and the atmosphere in which Colby students embodied decades and centuries ago. I wanted to understand and dig into the roots of Colby College and the rich history that came with this. With this being said,  I needed find a way to be able to encompass the general sense of the school through the alumni profiles.

With this being said, I found that the hardest part of this project was that I didn’t know which alumni’s to choose and how I would go about being able to capture an entire school’s environment through one person. There are also tens of thousands of profiles I had to go through in order for me to truly capture this. After meeting with Erin Rhodes, she brought up the idea of going through the Colby Echo, instead of the alumni profiles. Not only would this save me the time of going through one profile at a time, the Echo would also be a great place for me to read and see the truest of thoughts of Colby College and the voices straight from the students. I still need to find a way to narrow the angle and focus on a specific element of the Colby Echo, but I definitely believe that the student run newspaper would be a great source for me to gain more insight on the history and environment of Colby College in the past.

My long term plan is to work alongside special collections here at Colby and either publish my findings/project onto the website that they are already running, or to upload my work onto a WordPress that is connected through the special collections as well.