Hi Fort Followers,
This is Cameron Youngs checking in amidst all the craziness of 2020. I, along with Erika Hartley, have been organizing the “FSJAP Alum: Where Are They Now” series throughout this summer. For those of you that don’t know me, I was a field student during the 2018 field season. After working in the FSJAP lab at WMU for the 2018-2019 school year, I graduated that spring and returned to work for the Project during the 2019 field season as a Field Assistant. Shortly after, I also began working at the Niles History Center in Niles, Michigan. Once the 2019 field season came to an end, I transitioned to the position of the Fort St. Joseph Museum Intern in September. I was supposed to work as the intern for the Project until May, but I never expected it to end the way it did due to a pandemic.
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| Cam excavating half of a unit during the 2019 field season. Photo Credit: Hannah Rucinski. |
During March, I was actively working as the Fort St. Joseph Museum Intern until the threat of Covid-19 started to get serious here in Michigan. It seems like things escalated really quickly, as I recall the Kalamazoo police shutting down parties to stop the early spread of the virus, to a statewide shut down by the end of the month. Right before the stay-at-home order took place, I took a bad spill on my skateboard and broke parts of my left shoulder, and I had to have surgery the first day of the order. After a hazy month of post-op and roughly three months of physical therapy, my shoulder is almost like new!
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| Cam giving a pit tour at the 2019 Fort St. Joseph Open House. Photo Credit: Hannah Rucinski. |
My plans before all of this were to either work for the Project during the 2020 field season or to find a job in Cultural Resource Management as a field technician. But, between the cancellation of the 2020 field season and my shoulder injury, neither of my plans panned out like I expected them to. Around May when the field school was cancelled, Project members began brainstorming ways to maintain public engagement throughout the summer despite our current situation. We decided to reach out to the Project’s alumni to hear how they have been doing, so we could share their stories with you. The blog series “FSJAP Alumni: Where Are They Now” was started so that our followers could hear how twenty years of archaeology in Niles, Michigan impacted the lives and careers of the Project’s alumni. This series has taken place over the last 11 weeks, with past members spanning as far back as 18 years ago. With August coming to a close, we have a couple more weeks of blogs planned to update you on other Project initiatives, and members are working hard on providing additional online content for our followers.
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| Alive and well, masking up during Michigan's shutdown. Photo Credit: Cameron Youngs |
As for me, I’ve been working for the Project in some sort of way since my first field season back in 2018. Maybe not a full consecutive two years given a few small gap months, but close enough. After this blog series, my time with the Project will come to an end as I start the next chapter in my journey. My shoulder is almost at a complete recovery, and I am searching for my first job as a CRM field tech. At this rate I would be happy to find any job in the industry, but my hopes are to make my way out west to get away from the humidity, towards a drier climate with plenty of mountains on the horizon.
Sincerely,
Cameron Youngs
