Exploring ideas and engaging in conversation

Author: Eric A. Carstens (Page 1 of 4)

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.

Job Roundup

North East

Youth and Community Programs Educator – Montshire Museum of Science (Norwich, VT)

Public Programs Facilitator – New England Air Museum (Windsor Locks, CT)

Education Manager – Martha’s Vineyard Museum (Vineyard Haven, MA)

Registration Assistant – Hood College of Art, Dartmouth (Hanover, NH)

Collections Assistant – Historic Northampton (Northampton, MA)

Curatorial Assistant – deCordova Sculpture and Museum (Lincoln, MA)

Mid-Atlantic

Contract Junior Project Manager – Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC)

Mellon Foundation Curatorial Fellow – Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA)

Midwest

Associate Curator – Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)

South

Digital Media Coordinator – Kentucky Historical Society (Frankfort, KY)

Manager of Learning and Interpretation – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX)

West

Curator of Education and Engagement – High Desert Museum (Bend, OR)

Director of Public Programs – Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA)

What’s With All the Gay Penguins?

Ronnie and Reggie, two Humboldt penguins at ZSL London Zoo.

Over and over again, zoos and aquariums around the world are making headlines for their same-sex penguin couplings. One of the most iconic couples was Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins who began performing mating rituals at the Central Park Zoo in 1998. After successfully incubating a rock and then a dummy egg, zookeepers decided to give the loving couple a real, fertilized egg. Roy and Silo hatched a baby, a female penguin named Tango. Tango then grew up to form a partnership with another female penguin named Tanuzi.

Skipper and Ping, two king penguins at Zoo Berlin.

The list of gay penguin couples goes on and on and spans a wide range of species. Harry and Pepper were a pair of Magellenic penguins at the San Francisco Zoo. Sphen and Magic are a pair of male Gentoo penguins at SEA LIFE Aquarium in Sydney who hatched their first chick in 2018. Electra and Viola, also Gentoo penguins, are raising a chick at the L’Oceanogràfic in Valencia, Spain. At Zoo Berlin, two King penguins named Skipper and Ping have been trying to become fathers, unfortunately with no luck. Ronnie and Reggie are a pair of Humboldt penguins in London. In the Netherlands, a gay African penguin couple recently stole an egg from a lesbian penguin couple. The list goes on. Even in Parks and Rec, Leslie Knope hosts a wedding for two male penguins at the Pawnee Zoo.

The lives of male and female penguins are not as different from each other as we may expect. Regardless of sex, a parent’s responsibilities are similar—both invest equally in raising their chick. Aside from reproductive barriers, there is no reason why same-sex penguin couples cannot be successful parents. Penguins often lay more than one egg, though only one is likely to survive. In captivity, a same-sex penguin couple can adopt any extra eggs (though sometimes they steal eggs instead.) It’s likely that this happens in the wild too—though it’s harder to say. Visibly, male and female penguins really only differ in size, and not by much. That means it’s difficult to tell male and female penguins apart and even more difficult to identify any wild mating pairs as homosexual.

Rocky and Marama at SEA LIFE London.

In late 2019, mothers Rocky and Marama hatched a baby Gentoo penguin at SEA LIFE Aquarium in London. This baby Gentoo made further waves after the aquarium announced that it would not be assigning the chick a gender. The chick is identified with a gender-neutral purple tag rather than the usual gendered name and color coded tag. Beyond that, the penguin’s life will be the same as any other penguin at the Aquarium. Gender means nothing to penguins, so why have we continuously assigned it to them? The General Manager of the aquarium, Graham McGrath comments that the decision to raise a genderless penguin is following an increase in conversations around human gender neutrality. I applaud SEA LIFE London for taking a look at their practices and making changes based on a more nuanced understanding of gender.

The genderless penguin at SEA LIFE London, identified with a purple tag.

Besides, the animal kingdom is constantly subverting our expectations for both gender and sex. Male seahorses famously carry the young while they develop, and are the ones who eventually give birth. Bluehead wrasses all hatch as female. As they mature, some develop into males. These stories should be highlighted more. Most zoos and aquariums stick pretty exclusively to scripts around environmentalism and conservation. While those are incredibly important topics, I would like to see these institutions branch out. For example, a common argument against LGBTQIA+ rights is that “it’s not natural.” Zoos and aquariums have an opportunity to step in and say “actually, that’s not true.”

Job Roundup

Northeast

Marketing and Visitor Services Coordinator – Thomas Cole National Historic Site (Catskill, NY)

Museum Educator – Thomas Cole National Historic Site (Catskill, NY)

Development Associate – Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI)

Visitor Services Manager – Historic Deerfield (Deerfield, MA)

Thomas Dugan Curatorial Intern (Paid) – Concord Museum (Concord, MA)

Individual Giving and Membership Manager – JFK Library Foundation (Boston, MA)

Program Producer – Newark Museum of Art (Newark, NJ)

West

Curator of Collections and Exhibits – Millicent Rogers Museum (Taos, NM)

Archivist – Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)

Heritage Stewardship Supervisor – Jefferson County Open Space (Evergreen, CO)

Midwest

Digital Asset Manager – Illinois State Museum Society (Springfield, IL)

Assistant Manager of Visitor Services and Volunteers – Ruth Mott Foundation (Flint, MI)

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)

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