Authored By Gabby Rivera, Marketing and Content Specialist

"I have this urge inside of me to bottle it all up," Gracelyn Hinson said of her fascination with the human experience. For a rising senior interning in the archives with the Sisters of Mercy, that urge has become a job description—spending her days rehousing decades-old audio tapes, cataloging artwork and making sure no archive is lost to time.

The Sisters of Mercy have been part of the Charlotte area for decades, and their archive holds the record of that history—photographs, diaries, correspondence and decades-old recordings that Hinson, a history major with a minor in art history, now helps preserve firsthand. As culture continues to shift, she wants future generations to be able to look back and understand who came before them which allows viewers to not just see archetypes, but see the individuals.  

"Every object is a reflection of a particular experience of a different time, of a particular individual," Hinson said. "For me, it's really an opportunity to almost travel back to a different time or a different place."

Recently, Hinson prepared open-reel tapes, which are recordings of meetings and conversations dating back to the 1950s and '60s, now to be shipped to a vendor for digitization.

"I take the audio tapes, I rehouse them, [and] I make sure they're properly packaged," Hinson said. She also catalogs incoming artifacts using PastPerfect, an industry-leading collection software, and takes inventory of new shipments as they arrive.

Before this internship, Hinson was only inspired by archival work, never having hands-on experience with it.

"I know how to navigate an archive now,” Hinson said. “I had never done that prior to this internship, and having those technical skills makes me feel a lot more prepared and confident to one day walk into a space like the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

That's where Hinson hopes the path leads next: the Met in New York City, where she envisions herself curating exhibits that push against the “white cube” approach, the bare and minimalistic style many museums have. 

"I want to figure out a way to create exhibits that are more immersive, [that] make you feel like you're traveling into a different world almost," Hinson said.

This year, Hinson will apply that same instinct for storytelling to an honors history thesis on Zelda Fitzgerald, which she'll defend before a faculty committee. It's one more step, she said, toward not just preserving history—but telling its stories herself.

The SECU Public Fellows Intern Program connects UNC Charlotte undergraduate students with paid, community-focused summer internships across the Charlotte region. Supported by the SECU Foundation and administered by the Career Center team, the program offers meaningful, hands-on internships while strengthening community impact.