“I applied for this job as a first-year student because I wanted to be an archivist,” says Micah Mifsud, a senior history major with a creative writing minor from Avon Lake, Ohio. He is in the University Honors Program and is a student employee in University Archives and Special Collections. “Now I’m leaning toward public history and museum studies because I look for opportunities to be out and about talking to people.”
Meeting lots of people comes easily from Micah’s active engagement with several University of Dayton student organizations. He is president of the Flyer Pep Band, one of the reasons he came to UD, and is a founding member and president of the Pokémon Go Club. Micah also participates in Phi Alpha Theta, a history fraternity.
‘Flyer News,’ history trove
“I like to research daily life from an average person’s perspective,” Micah shared. “This can be challenging with the lack of records or writing.”
Thanks to One Day, One Dayton 2025 donors to the Dean’s Fund for Excellence, University Archives and Special Collections is able to continue steady digitization of the student newspaper, Flyer News.
“Flyer News is a great way to see what campus was like,” says Micah, who undertook a project last spring to record the page counts of every issue of Flyer News so that the papers would be ready for accurate digitization when funding became available. Since he looked at every issue, he has some highlights to share that illuminate daily life at UD:
- Cartoons and comic strips
- Opinion pieces
- Advertisements
- How campus responded to world events and their anniversaries