Among her many accomplishments as (to name a few) a USC Levan Institute undergraduate scholar, intern at KAYA Press, singer in the USC Collegium early music program and USC Shoah Foundation intern, Orli Robin has a particularly unique bragging right.

She’s the first student to begin work on USC’s brand-new Resistance to Genocide minor.

Robin, a junior English major with a creative writing emphasis (and Judaic Studies minor), has been interning at USC Shoah Foundation for the past two years. But she was first introduced to the Shoah Foundation as a freshman at Santa Monica High School, when one of her teachers assigned the class to watch testimony from the Visual History Archive and create artistic representations of a survivor’s story.

Robin created a metal wire sculpture of two roses coming together, inspired by the testimony of a Holocaust survivor named Rose.

“That one person’s experience, hearing her talk and hearing her courage and strength, is always something that stuck with me,” Robin said. “And it was the first testimony I watched.”

During her freshman year at USC, Robin attended a two-day Student Voices Short Film Contest workshop – not because she wanted to enter the contest, but to learn more about USC Shoah Foundation and the Visual History Archive. Following the workshop, she began working as an intern.

Her tasks have included helping set up the Institute’s iTunesU account, adapting IWitness for use in Jewish day schools, and planning Student Voices. Now, she is working with senior Institute fellow Doug Greenberg on a multimedia project about the experience of Jews in modern-day Ukraine before, during and after World War II, using testimony from the Visual History Archive.

Robin said she was getting ready for her first Skype call with Greenberg when she saw a brochure about the new Resistance to Genocide minor on USC Shoah Foundation director of research Dan Leshem’s desk.

“I got so excited,” Robin said. “Working with the Shoah Foundation has been an integral part of my life and my USC experience. I’m constantly surrounded by these testimonies and I’m working with these testimonies, but I need to have a greater sense of all the details so I can help in reconstructing that narrative. I also want to be able to have scholarly conversations on this topic.”

The minor is interdisciplinary, with courses in Judaic Studies, history, international relations and more.

Robin hopes to get her master’s in creative writing after graduating from USC next year so that she can pursue her combined passions for human rights, storytelling and creative nonfiction writing.

In the meantime, Robin said interning at USC Shoah Foundation empowers her to tell the stories of the survivors in the Visual History Archive. She remembers her grandmother telling her that when she was living in Baltimore during the Holocaust “they knew what was going on but they couldn’t do anything about it.” Now, Robin said, she feels it’s her responsibility to take action.

“Here at this amazing research university and this Institute I don’t feel helpless anymore,” Robin said. “I can help make a change.”