13 Jan 2023

A blog from Placement Student Chloe

Placement student Chloe, Cultural Heritage Management student at the University of York, tells us all about her time volunteering for the CBA and YAC

Hello there! My name is Chloe, and I am a Cultural Heritage Management student at the University of York. I am massively thankful that I have had the opportunity to complete a work placement at the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) with the Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC) over the Christmas break. While on this placement I have done a lot across various areas of YAC, from the creation of activities and activity blogs to admin work for the YAC Pass 2023 and spreadsheet handling.

Tree_craft.jpg

The majority of my placement took place before Christmas and was split between working from home and being in the office. One of the things I was asked to do during this time was to create a Christmas activity for the YAC Activities page, and being a huge lover of Christmas I was thrilled! I put together the Recycled Toilet Roll Christmas Tree activity and had a lot of fun getting the paint out and making my own (see below!). Whilst doing this I also helped to organise the YAC Pass for 2023, which involved emailing current partners to see if they wanted to continue providing the YAC Pass this year and if there were any changes that they wanted to make to their partner pages. This was a really interesting and enjoyable task to do, as I got to see the behind the scenes of the website, as well as see the number and variety of museums and organisations that are YAC Pass providers.

In the last week of my Placement before Christmas, I got to do some more Christmassy tasks, including creating a Christmas Activities Blog Page for 2022, drafting twitter posts for the Christmas Activities, and designing a Christmas-themed YAC logo using Canva. In the final few days of my placement before Christmas I was also able to try out the virtual reality goggles that were going to be used for outreach events by the CBA and was invited to take part in a staff day. While it had to be online due to train strikes, it was still really interesting to hear about everything that was going on in the other departments of the CBA.

A final element of my 2022 placement was using census data to create graphs using Microsoft Spreadsheets, which would later be used to explore how lesser-represented groups could be encouraged to get involved or stay involved for longer. This task was extremely interesting and thought-provoking, giving me an opportunity to contemplate what might cause certain groups to drop out or not get involved at all, and how YAC could help change this. After Christmas, I completed two more days at the beginning of January. During these days, I helped to design an online session for the Wales Online YAC on the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This was really fun to do, and I hope to be able to attend the session to see how it goes!

I have really really enjoyed my time with the CBA, and it has shown me the kind of work that I would love to go into. Children are literally the future of the discipline, and therefore the work done by YAC, helping make archaeology and the past an interesting, inclusive and enjoyable experience for all, is really important and I am thrilled to have been able to help out. I hope that members have enjoyed making the Christmas tree craft as much as I did, and I fully recommend taking up a placement with YAC if you would like to get involved in heritage and working with children and have the opportunity. Everyone is so friendly, and there is no end to the interesting tasks to do!

Thank you so much to YAC and everyone at the CBA for having me!