Calling all Yale students with incredible enthusiasm for Yale! This role strives to help us all better-understand Yale’s present and future by better-grounding us in how all the nuances of the Yale experience ‒ traditions, stories, values, architecture, and much more ‒ have delivered us thus far. For the 2026-27 academic year, the preservation fellowship will give selected students an opportunity to be part of the next wave of organizing Yale’s historical information and making it universally accessible and useful. Students will have a chance to build meaningful and joyful relationships with alumni leaders around the world, giving these leaders new insights into the history of the parts of the Yale experience for which these alumni leaders are caretakers. And finally, students will have a chance to build valuable, cutting-edge 21st century preservation skills which they might apply in future pursuits in historical research, curating, digital media and publishing, and beyond.
Among other responsibilities, fellows will:
- Take a “hands on” role leading the digitization of as-yet undigitized Yale collections that have substantial merit to the history of the University, particularly material pertaining to the University’s students, faculty, and alumni
- Identify and recommend collections that merit being made more widely accessible to our University community
- Find and share meaningful insights about Yale groups of all stripes with the leaders of those groups
- Assist in the development of high-interest stories about Yale’s history for possible inclusion in Yale-related publications and other media outlets
- Complement the work of Yale-focused teams in Yale Manuscripts and Archives and similar where there are mutually-welcomed opportunities to do so
- Serve as a Yale historian whose work is “of, by, and for Yale students past, present, and future”
While the fellowship is principally organized as an on-campus internship, students completing the fellowship may be invited ‒ as student’s time and interest allows ‒ to participate in large-audience presentations, interviews, and similar during the academic year to talk about discoveries made in the course of their work.
Job Requirements:
- Yale College students in their freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior years, or graduate and professional school students who will have concluded at least two semesters enrolled in a Yale degree program at the time they begin the fellowship.
- Interest and ability in discovering and accessing material in the Yale Archives and/or Yale Library, or willingness to learn
- Comfort using scanning and digitization equipment, or willingness to learn
- Based in Connecticut for the duration of the fellowship (at least 3-4 days per week worked in New Haven specifically)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Past experience with digital preservation or digital archival efforts
- Substantial Yale coursework and/or extracurricular engagement in one or more of History, Humanities, Architecture, American Studies, Classics, Computer Science, Journalism, English Language & Literature, Engineering & Applied Science, and/or Statistics & Data Science
- Evidence of outstanding Yale spirit and deep appreciation of Yale history
Compensation:
This is a paid internship opportunity.
The Yale History Preservation Fellowship is made available and funded by the Yale Club and Scholarship Foundation of Hartford, Inc. via the Club’s Student Fellowship program.
