After every busy term TORCH is delighted to welcome micro-interns to support our work for the week. The internships involve a wide range of TORCH work with particular focus on helping support our digital, communications and event areas. We always find that the insights and work that our micro-interns do is very beneficial to our work and their insights and fresh ideas help us improve many aspects of what we do.
In week 9 of Michaelmas Term we hosted 3 micro-interns who were incredibly helpful on a range of our projects.
Let's hear from one of them!
My Internship Experience with TORCH
The one-week micro-internship with TORCH has been a truly nourishing experience. Standing as a beacon of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, TORCH not only offers rich resources and innovative projects but also fosters a visionary community.
On the first day, we were introduced to the team. TORCH is a small group of researchers working on a wide range of projects. We were then given the task to edit the website, identifying and fixing spelling mistakes, broken hyperlinks, and oversized images. During this task, I took the opportunity to navigate the TORCH website—which is indeed colossal as the largest website in the university—and found many past events particularly intriguing. For example, the Silk Road project in collaboration with Katie Melua caught my attention. I was surprised to discover that the singer I knew had worked with a humanities centre at my university.
In another task, which involved organising the transcript for the ‘Book at Lunchtime’ YouTube video series, I was excited about watching the video featuring the discussion on Dr Jamina Ramirez’s new book Femina, an instant Sunday Times bestseller about medieval women. This subject intrigued me as I had studied it last term as part of my English degree. I also wrote two proposals: one for reorganising the website homepage and the other for enhancing social media platforms. It was particularly enjoyable to engage directly with the development of online platforms.
One recent project that impressed me most was Fantasy Futures, in which TORCH brought together academic researchers and industry professionals to create an immersive VR world. This installation in the Oxford city centre animates monsters from ancient stories using latest augmented reality and motion capture technologies. Having studied monsters in Beowulf and other early medieval literature, I was amazed by how this project preserves and shares history and culture with the public while embracing contemporary technologies. This project almost resembled what Oxford feels like to me: while deeply rooted in the weight of its beautiful past, it is always keeping up with latest contemporary concerns and looking into the future.
The one-week experience with TORCH was profoundly inspiring. The working environment was also very supportive and flexible. Working closely with the team has further affirmed my belief that TORCH’s research and projects deserve to be more widely recognised across academic networks and among the general public worldwide.
