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Category: Tufts Program (Page 1 of 13)

Trials and Tribulations of Finding an Internship During a Global Pandemic

Last March, the museum world shut down. Closing to the public, many museums laid off staff and shifted into survival mode. It was a scary prospect for students in the museum programs at Tufts—would there be jobs when we graduate? Even more immediately—how could we fulfill our practicum requirements?*

Personally, I had a lot of trouble finding an internship. I scoured empty internship portals and sent my resume and cover letters into countless voids. I heard from a few institutions that had halted their internship programming because they did not have the budget to pay their interns. While I appreciated that more museums are paying their interns, things were starting to feel hopeless.

Eventually, I lucked out and coordinated an internship at the Harvard Museum of Natural History after reaching out to the Director of Education. I had the opportunity to help translate HMNH’s annual ‘I Heart Science’ festival into a virtual event and created a series of ‘Specimen Spotlights’ with museum volunteers.

After my ordeal of finding an internship, I wanted to know how my colleagues navigated the museum internship wasteland. I sent out a survey to everyone in the Tufts museum studies program who completed an internship in Summer 2020, Fall 2020, or Spring 2021. Only students who completed the survey are included in the data.

First of all, where did students complete their internships?

Hannah McIsaac, Margot Rashba, Alexandra Harter, and Julia Wohlforth interned at Historic New England in the Study Center, conducting research using HNE’s extensive archives. Other students interned at a variety of museums and cultural organizations around New England in operations, education, collections, and exhibitions.

Natalie Gearin interned at Step Into Art, Inc. where she “spent the duration of the internship developing and teaching a new third-grade curriculum, taught exclusively on Zoom, on the art of Kehinde Wiley including an initial lesson, a portrait making activity, a poetry workshop, and a sketching activity.”

Like Natalie, most of us had to adjust our internships to work through Zoom. Many museums remained closed throughout the summer, and some still have not reopened. Amanda Leith and Abigail Lynn were able to land in-person internships for the spring at the McAuliffe-Shephard Discovery Center and Griffin Museum of Photography, respectively.

“I was lucky enough to have found an internship where I could be on-site, but the majority of my work could have been completed remotely in case everything shut down again.”

Abigail Lynn

Sayyara Huseynli, who works both remotely and in person at the Boston Children’s Museum, found a silver lining in her museum’s continued closure. “I am going to the museum in person on Saturdays, so my supervisor, security, and I are the only people in the whole building. Thanks to this, I was able to have some playtime in the exhibits. My favorite experience was crawling through the hanging bridge in the Construction Exhibit.”

When searching for an internship, I threw my resume at many walls, hoping something would stick.  Eventually, it did. I was curious about how my peers fared in their internship hunt.

Many students met their supervisor through Tufts, either as a professor or guest lecturer. Rachel Christ interned at ObjectIDEA, an exhibit design and interpretation planning firm founded by Matt Kirchman, one of the Exhibition Planning professors at Tufts. Others met their supervisors through Tufts advisors. A few of us managed to find internships with cold calling, but no one just applied to a posted position. There were just were so few options. Fortunately, we were able to find opportunities after a little digging.

This year has hit the museum world hard, yet I feel so privileged to have been able to learn and grow in an institution that was navigating the catastrophe. Though it’s not what I expected my practicum to look like when I enrolled in the program, I learn a ton and developed into a more well-rounded museum professional.

*Due to the pandemic, students could opt to take a class in lieu of an internship.

Revitalizing Historic House Museums – Testimony from Ann Atwood, Tufts Museum Ed Alum

If you’re still figuring out your summer plans, I’d like to recommend taking the Revitalizing Historic House Museums HIST 0289 – A course taught by Ken Turino and Barbara Silberman, which I took last summer. This course takes a deep dive into historic house museums: the challenges facing many of these museums and strategies to address them—including deciding if the most sustainable use of the house is not as a museum. I enjoyed the course and wanted to share some insights into why you should consider taking it.

It uses historic house museums as a lens for thinking about creating welcoming, community-centered organizations.  The course focuses on themes like community engagement, inclusion, creating relevant experiences, and management of organizations for sustainability. These themes transfer across museum types and are essential for the future of museums.

It stretches you to strategically think and plan at the organizational level. We worked through business cases in class where we analyzed documents to develop plans addressing real-world challenges faced by historic house museums (e.g., dwindling revenue, lack of connection with local communities, managing collections, etc.). This built to a final project where we proposed business models for how to use a historic house property.

You don’t need prior experience working in historic house museums. Most of my experience as a museum professional was in informal science education, having only dabbled in working in history contexts. I was able to keep up and learned a lot about historic sites, small museums, and how different aspects of museums operations interact across the organization.

If you’re interested in helping reinvent museums as welcoming, inclusive, community-centered organizations, please check this course out.

Ann Attwood (2020)

Week 9 – Learning space

In accordance to health and safety guidelines to prevent the spread of Covid-19, most higher education institutions in the US made the transition to virtual education, at least till the end of the Fall semester. For many students, this transition has called for certain changes/adaptations to be made in their living environments/homes to become more suitable as learning spaces.  

How have you adapted your living environment to meet your learning needs? What does your learning space look like? What kind of special tools/items you have that support your learning? 

Use these prompts to describe your study spaces. Please also include your name and location and don’t forget to include pictures 

Here is an example:

 

Email your pictures and responses to Sayyara.huseynli@tufts.edu 

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/11/half-of-us-elementary-and-high-school-students-will-study-virtually-only-this-fall-study-shows.html 

 

Responses for Week 6 – “Time”

The concept of time has occupied the brain of the human kind for millennia’s. The history of timekeeping  is just as ancient.  Nowadays, the passing of time can be observed through the changed in the environment, therefore it can be related to the concept of space but it can not be fully studied, for example in a lab. Therefore there is no universal explanation of time. Contrary to the highly concrete understanding of time, Cambridge professor Huw Price, argued that the basics of time stem from the inter world of an individual rather than the physical world. The fundamentals of time and its perception are related with the unique sense of a moments, its passage and the direction.

Despite the critical debates on the subject of time, I believe that the outbreak of the Pandemic and the global lockdowns is on the track of reevaluating certain, previously rigid concept of it. For this reason, I wanted to challenge the readers of the blog to find material representations of such complex concept as time without leaving their living environments. I am happy to share with the responses of the readers below:

Zahra Mammadova
Baku, Azerbaijan 
Curatorial/educational assistant at YARAT Contemporary Art Space

I would like to share my object relating to the topic of “Time” as a part of online exhibition. 

Although there should be nothing difficult about sharing this object, still I felt a little bit uneasy, even mysterious while preparing myself to it, which leads to an obvious thought – it matters to me very much. 

This little angel, that you see from the photos below, was bought by friend of mine, more specifically by our family friend in London, UK, in one of his trips. This person was a professional mountain climber, who was lost in mountains 3 years ago with his fellows and then was found dead thereafter a year. 
The last time I had any connection with him, was 10+ years ago, when I was still a little child, and barely remember everything.  I had very much sympathy and respect for this intelligent person, but sadly then our families stopped communicating for a while. After roughly 10 years, we reconciled and I was planning to meet him one day after such a long time, when I grew up to into an adult, and he was successfully doing his career in industrial alpinism. I still has this words sounding in my mind  how his mother would tell me several times  “come visit us, Namin have a lot of books to share with you, you will find so many topics to talk, it will be exciting”  And every time I would respond “I will come in recent days definitely , but unfortunately now I do not have TIME”. I was thinking in my mind, “yeah there is no reason to rush, hopefully we will meet soon” After he went missing, and then found dead his mother shared his belongings with people. And this little angel she gifted to me. She said that he bought 2 of such angels, one of them is his sister’s the other was kept untouched. She explained the reason: the two angels were bought for individuals who he considered special to him, one of them is the sister, as for the other – he was waiting for right person to give it to them. And, ironically this one was forgotten in its package for a lot of years. Now it is placed in the shelve above my bed. This is strange, how life can turn events in unimaginable ways, I still find it mystic why and how this little angel which was meant to be given to a special person ended up in my hands.

 
The lesson that I learned from this story and what this object symbolizes to me was the following: never, ever postpone meetings with friends, family, significant people in your life that you plan. Always be in touch with them and share your kindness, care, and time with them – do not be greedy in this regard. By doing this, you double good emotions and gift them to your loved ones. And now, sometimes I feel like this object angel is with me for a reason, I feel a spiritual connection with it. 

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Introducing New Editors!

It’s that time once again for the editors we have come to know and love to hand over the reins to upcoming editors. Congratulations to you all on your graduation! We as new editors will do our best to uphold the standards you have set as we take it from here. 

Now to introduce ourselves! Your new editors are:

Alexandra Harter

Alexandra Harter, MA in History and Museum Studies

Hello everyone! My name is Alexandra Harter and I am starting my second year in the History and Museum Studies MA program at Tufts. Growing up in Virginia, there were tons of opportunities to go to museums – especially those with a focus on history – as I went through school. While I loved studying history since I was a child, it wasn’t until my undergraduate studies at the University of Richmond that I decided to pursue my love of history in my career. My interest in museums played a significant part in this decision, as it was during my semester abroad in London and all of the time that I spent at institutions such as the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum that helped me to realize what I was passionate about.

I discovered a passion for archival research and academic writing throughout my studies and interned at Agecroft Hall, a Tudor era historic house museum that was transported from England to Richmond, VA in the early twentieth century. Accessibility is a particular concern that I have within the museum, so I worked to translate the regular tour that I had learned into Spanish for visitors as part of my internship. While at Tufts, I have learned so much more about what it means to be an accessible museum as well as other issues that museums must consider when they think of how to serve their communities. I am thrilled to say that my studies here have broadened my interest in various museum positions, from curator to conservator to collections manager. I look forward to continuing to learn even more as I help to run this blog with my classmates!

 

Abigail Lynn

Abigail Lynn, MA in Art History and Museum Studies

Hello! My name is Abigail Lynn and I am a second year in the Art History and Museum Studies Program at Tufts University. Having grown up in rural Indiana, visiting a museum meant hopping in the car for a bit of a drive to get to a larger city. To this day, I can still remember my first visit to the Chicago Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois. It seemed like such a massive place, and there was art everywhere I looked. From that point on I knew art was always going to be a part of my life.

During my undergraduate studies, I thought I would give studio art a try, and paired that degree with studies in history and Spanish. However, when I had the opportunity to take a trip to Italy, I realized my love of research, digging into the background of an artwork or an artist to find out what makes them tick. I also realized that I wanted to share my love of art with others, and offer them the same, rewarding experience I had at the Chicago Art Institute.

Since then I have volunteered at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and worked for the Mariana Kistler Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas in order to gain more experience within the museum field. I have also had the opportunity to hold a fellowship position at the Tufts University Art Galleries. While at Tufts, I have further developed my writing and researching skills, and more fully realized the responsibilities awaiting future museum professionals. I hope this blog will provide another avenue through which I can share and learn along with other museum enthusiasts.

 

Eric Carstens

Eric Carstens, MA in Museum Education

Hi everyone! My name is Eric Carstens and I am starting my second year in the Museum Education program. I am from Northern Virginia and grew up going to the Smithsonian Museums in DC. A long time animal enthusiast, I credit both the National Museum of Natural History and the National Aquarium for encouraging my love of the natural world.

In undergrad, I studied biology and marine science, continuing a lifelong obsession with the ocean. I figured out that I did not want to spend my days in the lab and starting pursuing science communication. I homed in on museums after interning at the Science Museum of Virginia, writing scripts and gathering information for programming about climate change. As a young visitor, I learned the value of science museums in sparking curiosity and translating complex topics into engaging and digestible information. I now want to help create inclusive museum spaces for all museum-goers to learn about science, particularly natural history, climate change, and conservation.

Since the Science Museum of Virginia, I have worked as an environmental educator at Change is Simple, an environmental non-profit, as well as a visitor services assistant at the MIT Museum and a visitor educator at the New England Aquarium. Thanks to the Tufts program, I’m far less intimidated by art and history museums and I’m looking forward to exploring all kinds of museums through this blog!

 

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