Hi! My name’s Sam Bisno. I’m a sophomore. On campus, in addition to my involvement with Service Focus, I’m an editor at The Nassau Weekly, a tour guide at the art museum, an active member of the Princeton Democrats, and a mentor for the Humanities Sequence. I’m thinking of concentrating in history. I also watch lots of baseball.
This summer, I’m interning with StoryCorps, a US-based nonprofit that collects stories, primarily in the form of interviews between loved ones, and adds them to a vast archive of human voices housed at the Library of Congress. They do this with the goal of building a more connected, inclusive, and just society.
I’m on the Marketing and Communications team. My roles are pretty varied: on any given day I could be doing something as granular as writing copy for social media posts or as broad as strategizing an approach to distribution over the coming months. My internship entails three major projects: curate a story collection on the website and develop an accompanying set of posts for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; develop a comprehensive report on the performance of that campaign; and organize A/B testing to determine what makes effective content. I’m enjoying it!
It’s true that my impact on the world through this work is relatively small. I often wonder if it really matters whether a Facebook caption reads one way or another. And then there are my qualms about social media in general. But I think that the mission of StoryCorps is a worthwhile one, and if I can help someone move through life more empathetically by introducing them to our archive, then I’m doing something meaningful. My favorite part of the job is listening to participants’ interviews; they’ve had a profound impact on me. One that I’ll never forget was from two formerly incarcerated people. They considered the deep-rooted racism of the American justice system and recounted the stigma and discrimination they faced even after re-entry.
I’m grateful to have the opportunity to share stories like that.
