This year marks the tenth anniversary of one of the major educational endeavors at the Center for History of Physics (CHP). The Teaching Guides on History of the Physical Sciences (previously called the Teaching Guides on Women and Minorities in Physics, but we’ll just call them the “Teaching Guides”) first began in 2013 in an effort to diversify representation in the physics classroom. Now, ten years later, over 50 teaching guides are available online for K-12 classrooms, college professors, and anyone else who wants to learn about the diverse historical community of physical scientists.
The collection has expanded little by little every summer as it has been added to and worked on by graduate research assistants and interns from the Society of Physics Students (SPS). At CHP we have been delighted to welcome 14 SPS interns in total so far to work on the teaching guides, many of whom also spent time working with the Niels Bohr Library & Archives. We say it every year, but every summer our corner of AIP feels reinvigorated with the infectious energy our new coworkers bring and we’re always sad to see them leave. To mark the tenth anniversary of the teaching guides, I reconnected with some of our former interns to talk about their experiences and see where they are now.