Student Stories

Students ate snacks, grabbed some swag, and sent postcards to friends and family — thanks to student Library Ambassadors.

Reflections by Michigan Library Scholars intern SJ Shin on their work on the "Borderless Seed Stories" 2024 MLS project.

Julian Creutz's contributions to his Michigan Library Scholars internship, called "Borderless Seed Stories," are outlined, along with what he learned through the project and his thoughts on its impact.

As a Michigan Library Scholars intern, I worked on a project about how international students experience the libraries, and what needs international students share and don’t share with American students. The aims of this project are to yield concrete findings to specific research questions and produce recommendations for the U-M Library so we can learn how to more effectively serve international students and make the libraries more inclusive, accessible, and useful spaces for all.

The international undergraduate student population at U-M makes up around 17% of our undergraduate community. To uncover their unique perspectives, U-M library conducted the first campus-wide survey in 2023. As a Michigan Library Scholar and an international student myself, I gained valuable skills and insights into my peers' experiences with the U-M library system, revealing some remarkable findings.

An upcoming film screening series (fall of 2024) will explore democracies, protest, and voting around the globe. Three films from the United States, China, and Korea, will spotlight various movements and issues affecting voters over the last fifty years. This project is part of the Michigan Library Scholars library internship.

Happy Birthday Stefan is an Pinteresque comedy short film following Stefan, an early 20s pre-med student. After a long day, Stefan comes home to find his family and friends have thrown a surprise party for him. The only problem is it’s not his birthday, and he’s never met any of these people in his life.
This work, while standing alone as solely a chaotically psychedelic milieu, further serves as a repurposed trenchant political allegory on the current crisis of democratic backsliding and populist rhetoric in the United States.
Happy Birthday Stefan allows viewers to contemplate the danger of U.S democracy being overturned, and who dictates whether or not this happens. In the age of the “uninformed voter,” and amidst the political regression sweeping the nation, exemplified from insurrection to reproductive rights restriction to rampant civilian onslaught, this message has never been more relevant.

Iphis and Ianthe is a short film that places the Greek myth of the same name in a more contemporary framework.

The original myth of Iphis and Ianthe tells the story of an impoverished couple in ancient Crete who is forced to give up their daughter due to their inability to afford her future dowry price. However, on the evening before the delivery of her daughter, Telethusa prays to the goddess Isis for a solution. Isis gives her word that she will have a daughter but the next day, Telethusa gives birth to a daughter. She hides her child’s gender to her husband and raises the baby as a boy, naming him Iphis. Iphis grows up unaware of his differences from his male friends. One day, he meets a young woman named Ianthe and they instantly fall in love. Iphis quickly asks for her hand in marriage but fears her discovery of his female sex. He begs Isis to make him a biological man and she grants his wish, fulfilling her promise to Telethusa 18 years prior.

Our film updates this story, questioning the idea that all transgender individuals seek surgery to alleviate their dysphoria. Instead, we discuss Iphis’s process of learning how to accept his body and becoming comfortable sharing himself with another human being.

Team PACT stands for “Preventive and Accessible Cervical Cancer Testing” and is an M-HEAL project team. We formed in the Fall of 2021.
Team PACT is partnered with Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana to develop a method for
cervical cancer screening that is effective, non-invasive, and cost-efficient. Our device
accomplishes this by collecting urine to be screened for high-risk HPV strains. Our mission is
to design a cervical cancer screening urine collection device for genotypic females aged
21-65 who are unable or uncomfortable with getting tested by a medical professional.

From mid-May to mid-July this summer, I joined the U-M Library’s International Studies team as their Southeast Asian studies librarianship intern. I applied to the inaugural internship program, hoping to build upon my previous work experiences in metadata and cataloging services at three different academic libraries in California and Massachusetts. As a student copy cataloger and a part-time assistant, I mainly proofread certain parts of bibliographic records that are considered crucial (e.g. book titles, page numbers, etc.) and transferred records from a shared online database to a local one used by the U-M Library. In other words, I did what is called copy cataloging and other entry-level tasks involved in processing new library materials. In short, I arrived in Ann Arbor with the goal of expanding my understanding of librarianship, which was limited to a few library jobs I have had.