Through opportunities provided by the Carolina Covenant, Nya Smythe gained hands-on experiences that informed her career goals.
Carolina Covenant Scholar Nya Smythe ’24 is a force in the Carolina community and wants to continue having an impact after graduation. From extracurriculars to her internship to her academic studies, Smythe is a diligent and focused scholar who emphasizes the importance of culture and community.
Her hard-working mindset began well before Carolina. She took her first anthropology course as a sophomore in high school, and in May 2024 she will graduate from Carolina with a major in anthropology.
With both her parents obtaining college degrees and her mom obtaining a health care administration degree from Fayetteville State University, Smythe not only continued in their tradition, she started early. While attending Cumberland International Early College High School, she took dual-enrollment classes at Fayetteville State University.
During her high school years, she also spent much of her free time volunteering, including at a horse farm, where she gained understanding of the importance and value of helping her community — and how animals are part of a thriving community, too.
Now Smythe dreams of being a conduit for people’s voices, giving them the space and opportunity to share how they feel and voice their opinions. After graduating, Smythe hopes to work collecting oral histories and building community archives. She also hopes to continue growing her hard skills, such as working with more audio equipment, transcribing interviews and learning to be more specialized in podcasting.
Through opportunities provided by the Carolina Covenant, she has already garnered crucial experiences that will help her reach those career goals. Carolina Covenant is UNC-Chapel Hill’s groundbreaking program for students that offers a debt-free path to graduation through a combination of grants, scholarships and work-study – no loans. The Covenant also offers academic, career and well-being support to help Covenant Scholars thrive at Carolina and beyond.
“It’s not just about the money the Carolina Covenant provides,” she said. “It’s also about the opportunities that come from being a Carolina Covenant Scholar that make it so worthwhile.”
Smythe had an incredible internship in summer 2023. From June through August, she worked as a public history fellow at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill. The center is a partner of the Covenant Career Accelerator Program. Carolina Covenant director, Candice Powell, strongly recommended that Smythe apply for an internship with the center given her academic interests and professional goals. The center’s mission is to honor, renew and build community in the historic Northside, Pine Knolls and Tin Top neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina. She had many hands-on opportunities in the public history department, including working on deliverables, recording audio and event planning.
“I co-hosted a pool party that was at the A.D. Clark Pool, a historical Black pool,” said Smythe. “The Black community protested and fought for the pool to be there. Until the pool, Black community members swam in creeks and watering holes. Unfortunately, this endangered many Black community members, children in particular. This pool created a space for the Black community to take swimming lessons, enjoy leisure time and work as lifeguards or at the snack bar. The party commemorated the pool’s history, and I was so grateful to record the speakers’ oral histories.”
During her internship, she also researched the importance of Black educators in three predominantly Black neighborhoods, and she conducted interviews with important educators in the community. One of those interviews was with the principal of Northside Elementary School, Coretta Sharpless. Smythe valued Sharpless’ philosophy when it came to being a principal and admired that she is a Northside native.
“I’ve done a range of things in my role as a public history fellow, and I’m just really proud of my work,” Smythe said.
Another vital experience in Smythe’s journey was her contributions to the Descendants Project at Carolina.
“I started working on the project as a sophomore student, then I became a research mentor for a similar version of the class for freshmen,” she said. “I would say that’s been pivotal to me wanting to continue sociocultural work in anthropology.”
The Descendants Project aims to uncover the complete stories of victims of lynchings, their legacies and their descendants by tracing family histories through digital resources such as ancestry.com, alongside obituaries, birth records and other available documents. Students learn to conduct digital historical research that has an impact in the present day, and their research leads them into local communities to conduct interviews with the descendants of those victims. Interviews are preserved in UNC’s Wilson Library as an oral history archive.
“This project is important to me because I engage with a dark side of public history and address harrowing silences in the Black community,” Smythe said. “This is a collaborative community-led project, so I don’t feel alone in this journey.”
Smythe stressed that she wouldn’t have been able to contribute to that project without her Carolina Covenant mentor Ron Strauss, a professor with joint appointments in dentistry, social medicine and public health, who made her aware of the opportunity after she expressed interest.
Smythe is grateful for all the guidance she’s received during her time at Carolina, and support from the Carolina Covenant mentor initiative has been extremely important in encouraging her career path.
“The Carolina Covenant mentor initiative is awesome,” she said. “One of the former leaders of that group matched me with Professor Strauss, and I appreciate that connection and all the helpful advice I’ve received from him.”
She loves that the advice she’s received is not just advice, it’s options. Her mentors don’t want to limit her to one track.
”If I express an interest, that usually opens up a bigger conversation about how I can pursue that interest, what avenues are awaiting me and the requirements needed. They want to make sure that if I’m interested in something, I’m a good fit for it,” Symthe said.
Someone else who’s been instrumental on Smythe’s educational journey is Jessie Durham-Nash, assistant director for career development and outcomes for the Carolina Covenant. Durham-Nash communicated with Smythe throughout the summer, providing her with recommendations on various topics. Additionally, the Carolina Covenant undergraduate interns were integral in helping Smythe network and find her path at Carolina, as well as discovering potential career paths in sociocultural anthropology.
Smythe said the Carolina Covenant empowered her to do so much for herself.
“I want to say thank you to those who support Carolina Covenant students. We’re top-tier students, and I’m grateful for their support in our journeys to be great Tar Heels.”
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