Most of the work that I did for this internship was office work that supported bigger events. Early on in the internship I participated in developing content for the Dino Dash and Fossil Day that happens every October at the museum. This day was led by Nick Van Acker, who works on a lot of the science programming at the museum.
When Nick was working on this project, I offered to help with whatever he needed help on. Some of the stuff that I worked on was the usual internship work like making copies and stuff, but I did get to help create the Junior Paleontologist Scavenger Hunt. I ended up using previous versions from years gone by and also developed new questions for this year’s version. It was a lot of fun, and my first real attempt at creating content in a museum space. That was one example of the behind the scenes work that I did.
One of the earliest projects that I worked on was researching Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) for a new docent program. I spent some time researching the process of actually doing VTS as well as the finding information for a handout and a video example. This was a nice early project to work on, since I am comfortable researching and I knew about VTS already. We ended up using the video that I found, which was great.
However, not all the office-based work that I did was as exciting and fun at content creation. I also did a lot of the grunt work. I worked on cleaning up the docent lounge and creating a better organizational system for the supplies. I helped with whatever smaller tasks needed doing on the days I was there. I also worked on data entry. I entered in all of the information of past large group visits to the museum for the last couple of years. I also entered in the information about gallery kit checkouts and returns, as well as SEAL Tots group information data entry. I will admit this was not very interesting at times. While I enjoy organizing and cleaning things up, these tasks can get repetitive and aren’t very engaging. Even though they are necessary for the running of the department.
I know that these were important tasks even if they weren’t always super engaging. And it was helpful for me to see that working in a museum is a mixture of all of these components: data entry, programming creation, etc. So it was nice to have that balance during this internship.
Museum Musings 