Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area surrounded by many of the world’s premier museums, AU graduating senior Annalise Vezina always knew that she wanted to study history one day. “I went into college already knowing that I wanted to major in history,” she says. “There are just so many things to learn about, and the deeper you go you realize there is even more to learn.” Fluent in French, Vezina developed a passion for European history and the history of the Holocaust, which eventually led to a fascinating internship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “There are so few Holocaust survivors nowadays,” Vezina says. “You get to know them in a different way than you would just listening to testimony and writing papers about it.” Since June 2024, Vezina has worked as an intern for both the museum’s Youth and Community Programs and its Social Team. In this dual capacity, she leads weekend classes for high school students while also helping to create content for the museum’s social media platforms, among other responsibilities. 

One of her favorite programs is called “Bringing the Lessons Home,” in which she teaches high school students how to give a two-hour tour of the museum’s Permanent Exhibition, the same program she went through in ninth grade. “You can’t just inundate them with information, which can be very depressing,” Vezina says. “You have to be able to make a personal connection with them and find a way to get to the emotion of the topic at hand. Otherwise you will lose your audience.” The more she learns about the Holocaust, the harder it is to fit everything she wants to say into a two-hour tour. “Every year my tour of the Permanent Exhibition gets longer and longer because I learn more stories and contextualizing details that I want to tell. Then suddenly my tour was three hours long!”

Vezina’s duties with the Social Team include researching and writing content for the Museum’s social media accounts, such as Instagram and Facebook. “I love this type of work because it is very historically grounded and every piece of content goes through multiple rounds of review,” she says. The impact of her work can feel very different depending on the audience. With the museum’s social media accounts, Vezina’s work can reach a global audience. “The museum has about three million followers across all platforms,” she says, “so three million people or more will read whatever you’re posting.” In the classroom, however, Vezina works with approximately fifty high school students, spending five hours per day once a week over the course of fourteen weeks. Though her audience is smaller, the impact is more personal. “You can see the reactions of the students firsthand and watch them grow.”