Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

The Event & Facilities Intern will be exposed to a variety of Facilities Department tasks, which includes working with food operations/Café Minnesota, building rentals, facilities maintenance, inventories, databases, etc.

Student Responsibilities:

Student responsibility include areas of understanding policies and procedures, accuracy & compiling databases, creation of satisfaction cards and surveys, and working on a larger team to understand Facilities operations within a large non-profit institution.

• Café Minnesota Operations
  • Review Policy and Procedure Pages for clearer understanding of Café operations and rewrite as needed.
  • Create a Customer Satisfaction Card for the Café Minnesota.
  • Update databases of information related to Café equipment, rental equipment, and other necessary information related to the Café (and rentals).
  • Organize and update budget information as well as other processes within Café operations.
• All events including rentals, public programs, hosted programs, & internal meetings
  • Review Policy and Procedure Pages for clearer understanding of events and programs occurring at the MN History Center and make recommendations for clarity to information
  • Review current rental website at MHHS and research other like-institutions. Make recommendations for updates to the MHHS rental website page.
  • Review hosted events forms and make recommendations for clarity of process to MNHS staff.
  • Organize and update budget information as well as other processes within programming & event operations.
• Building Maintenance including custodial, carpentry, and other plant management teams
  • Attend meetings including Facility Department and other project meetings with Plant Management Staff as needed
• Other building projects
  • Work with Facilities staff member to coordinate a comprehensive carpet inventory of all locations in the MN History Center, and document on building maps
  • Work with Facilities staff members on projects that occur regularly, seasonally, and unexpectedly.

Knowledge intern is expected to gain:

• Experience working within and an understanding of Facility operations within a of a large non-profit, educational institution
• Experience in understanding events (both public, private, hosted, and internal)
• Writing skills as well as procedure comprehension and editing
• Organizational skills
• Multi-tasking abilities

The Minnesota Historical Society is committed to program evaluation as a valuable tool for strengthening the quality of our programs and to measure and improve outcomes for those we serve. This Intern will support various projects to develop staff resources for program evaluation. Several visitor studies will be conducted throughout the year.  The major focus is to support the development of an institutional dashboard for reporting and sharing performance results. This includes data collection, data entry and cleaning, graph creation for internal and external dashboards, as well as written dashboard reports.

Intern Tasks May Include:

• Collect dashboard data from multiple data “owners”
• Verify and/or correct discrepancies in data
• Enter data into online dashboard database
• Create charts and graphs for visual display of data
• Create written dashboard reports from templates
• Conduct visitor intercept surveys
• Conduct qualitative data analysis
• Other evaluation projects as assigned

Knowledge and skills intern is expected to gain:

• Knowledge of program evaluation in a museum environment
• Experience working with museum professionals and program evaluators
• Experience designing and implementing dashboards for reporting performance results
• Experience with evaluation capacity building