Semester Evaluation

 Guest post by Brady Steinbrecher

For my research on this course, I feel that I took a different approach than most of my peers. Each project we completed required the selection of an idea, event, or person and then complete a copious amount of research regarding our selected topics. However, one thing that I did differently from most of my peers was relate the topics I chose, connecting all my research with the culmination of the re-enactment.

From the beginning of the class, I was planning out my re-enactment, with the original idea being to portray a former chancellor of UWM. I was working through my research for our presentation in the museum when I began to get enthralled by the history of Manfred Olson. By working with the UWM archives and utilizing the scrapbook curated by Olson, I was able to begin to develop an in-depth profile of the construction of the planetarium as well as Professor Olson himself.

I really enjoyed doing research through the UWM archives, looking through the old school yearbooks and photos, as well as looking at online publishing about Professor Olson. I was able to cobble together my semester’s long research into one final reenactment. By beginning with the planetarium as my subject, I was able to get an introduction to Olson, then I worked backwards through his life. I think that the biggest tool I used to construct his life was the UWM Post and yearbook archives available from the school. Professor Olson was very involved with it, as well as the construction, and it really allowed me to build a good profile of my character.

Through this project I was able to learn not only about the construction of the planetarium, but also the mind behind it. I enjoyed the fact that all my research culminated at the end of the semester, I think it helped me get a much more in-depth understanding of Olson’s life because I spent so long working on it. With the history project at the beginning of the semester I was able to plot out the end of Olson’s life through his work on the planetarium, then working backwards for the final project, I felt like I had a good foundation to build my re-enactment.