Elle Hall-Holt, NUR ’26, Northfield, MN
The Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing History welcomed me as their first undergraduate research fellow in the summer of 2025, and it was a truly fantastic experience. On my first day at the Center my supervisor started by asking me “so, what are you interested in?” I have never had a job where everything I do is driven almost exclusively by my own interests and what information I think is important to explore. It was exhilarating to develop my own research project with the help of talented and passionate curators and historical experts at the Barbara Bates Center. There were so many diseases and eras I was interested in; it was difficult to narrow my topic down to just one thing. I started by researching the 1918 flu, pivoted to investigating tuberculosis in the 1930s, then finally settled on studying working conditions and segregation in nursing during the early post-World War Two Era. Even when I had narrowed down my interest area, my project twisted and turned into something I never expected because I found exciting information in the archives that led me in new directions. Instead of trying to keep my project inside the bounds of my initial expectations, I allowed myself to explore new topics and ways of communicating my findings throughout my fellowship. Every week I spent at the Barbara Bates Center I learned new things about both nursing history and how to be an effective researcher.
My research focused on a survey done by the Local Association of Colored Graduate Nurses of Philadelphia and Vicinity about the demographics and funding of nursing employers in Philadelphia in 1946. In addition to digitizing the data and adding the nursing employer locations and survey responses to a map in ArcGIS, I compiled information on the nursing working conditions for four of the healthcare organizations in Philadelphia in 1946. To find this information I had to learn how to do archival research, which was an entirely new skill for me. Although slow at first, digging through the archives got me hooked on researching nursing history. Soon, it was difficult for me to stay focused on finding specific pieces of information because I was finding so many other interesting stories in the archives. After completing my research in the archives, it was time for me to find a way to communicate my research findings in a format that would be both helpful and accessible to other historical researchers and the public.
I would not have been able to make an interactive map of my research findings without the help of Ben Liebersohn, a geospatial and mapping fellow working at Penn Libraries. Ben gave me a crash course on ArcGIS in just three weeks all while sparking my interest in geospatial data visualization and analysis. With guidance from my supervisor and Ben, I was able to produce a project I am proud of, and one that will be useful to nursing history researchers in years to come.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2025 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
