Internships Blog

The city of Roanoke organized an event for the community called the “Generic Magic Festival.” The goal was to engage families in the institutions participating such as the Virginia Museum of Transportation. At the museum, we created two fun programs for children and their parents to take part in. Inside, they could make slime and create dry ice tricks with steam. Outside with all the trains was where I was located and had broom races. Unfortunately, not a lot of children showed up because the weather was not great, but it was still a wonderful experience being a part of the magic festival. I enjoyed helping put things together and watching the few kids that did show up learn and use their “magic” powers throughout the day.

In the last couple of weeks I have continued helping out and learning new things at the museum. I have gotten the chance to do some research and even accession and archive a few things. The biggest and most consuming thing, however, that has been going on recently has been the museum’s annual Ghost Walk. Every year a number of volunteer actors dress up as historical “ghosts” from various points in Salem’s past and people are able to experience these “ghosts” through tours that take place in the museum and mostly in East Hill Cemetery. I didn’t just get to help set up for the Ghost Walk this year, I actually dressed up with some friends to become a “ghost” myself. My friends and I were three World War One soldiers from Salem dressed up in appropriate costumes. I was lucky enough to get to have an actual helmet from the war as well. This was a really awesome opportunity for me as I had never really been involved in reenactments or things of that kind and so this was a new and interesting experience.

 

I started my internship about two weeks ago at the Virginia Museum of Transportation. For the rest of the semester I will be working with the education department in the museum to organize programs for younger visitors as well as help improve the existing exhibits. The museum has galleries about automobiles, trains, and aviation. As the education intern, my job is to correlate these exhibits with the Virginia Standards of Learning.

These last two weeks have been filled with learning and meeting a lot of new people. Most of the people I have met are volunteers and just do it for the love of history, transportation, Roanoke, or even all three. I’m excited to see what this semester of interning has in store. I have already met great people who are teaching me a lot about the museum world.

So far at the Salem Museum I have been introduced to many different and cool things. I have learned about exhibit design and some of the crucial techniques that go into it. I have learned how to catalog and accession items online as well as how to find existing items in the archive room. I have managed to help out in a number of ways. These include cataloging new items and taking inventory of unknown boxes. They also include simply moving tables to another floor and  replacing the filters on air vents.

This may seem like a wide menagerie of things, but it has allowed me to understand various different aspects of museum work. Plus, I get to take some work of off Alex and Fran’s shoulders to make their lives a little easier. Since it has only been a couple of weeks, I know that there are still many new things in store for me as I continue my internship. I am excited to keep gaining this valuable experience.

I am Christa Waterwiese, a senior International Relations major and History minor. This year, in the fall and spring, I am interning at the Grandin Theatre Film Lab. The Grandin Film Lab is an integrated model of experiential learning in filmmaking for high school students in the Roanoke and Salem area.  The Film Lab teaches students film production, lighting, screenwriting, storytelling, acting, sound engineering, and film industry acumen.  The program is through the Historic Grandin Theatre, which is just across the street. The students spend their time learning and then developing their own short films in the second semester of the program. The short films are even submitted to film contests across the country!

This year the Film Lab has two separate groups, Beginners and Advanced. I am interning with the Beginners on Mondays and Wednesdays. Since I have started, the Beginners (almost all sophomores) have begun working on understanding the breakdown of stories and script writing. As the intern, I help with administrative duties and serve as a teacher’s assistant to the Program Coordinator. This past session was the most interactive so far. The students started developing their own screenplay scripts based on songs they chose. I went between the students and helped them cultivate their ideas, assist with understanding screenplay formatting, and helped with learning the program. Their scripts are due this coming Wednesday, and I will continue to help the students write on Monday.

 

Today marks the one week anniversary of my time interning at he Salem Museum and Historical Society. Even  though I have spent so little time there so far, I am already extremely excited about spending the rest of the fall semester at this internship. I have always been interested in history museums and all of the different things that go into creating and maintaining them. This is an amazing opportunity to finally learn about and gain a deeper understanding of this topic.

Last week was mostly focused on introducing me to the various exhibits and rooms of the museum while reflecting on how the space has been utilized. Today, however, I finally got to do something more hands on. I got to help take down and put away objects from an exhibit case and replace them with different artifacts centered around a new theme. I was able to search though the archives using a computer program and then physically find the items that looked like they would fit in this exhibit with the new theme. Although the archives seemed very big and daunting at first, I quickly started to get the hang of things and understand the placement and arrangement of artifacts in it. I honestly got pretty enthralled in this little project so much so that I was kind of disappointed to have to return to campus to get lunch and deal with my other classes and responsibilities that lie outside of this fantastic internship.

When I began my Internship the only thing I knew for certain was that I would have to work 120 hours. The work itself combined with my day to day life was a bigger mystery to me than the pyramids.

What I found out, almost immediately, was that not only was this work enjoyable, but it was infectious. If a certain job I had been given took more than one day to complete, I would immediately ask to come in on my day off in order to finish it. Usually I would be fine with a day off, but there was something about the museum work that drove me.

Quickly it became clear that this would be a summer of fun, hard work, learning, and having fun while learning at work. I learned about soft-packing, accessioning, archives, artifact storage, past perfect, and many other practical things for museum work, but the most important thing I learned was that I could love working in a museum. Fulfilling Roanoke College’s requirement was good, but that is not why I went to work every day. I went to work because I loved it. This is what I learned. Any class can teach you about courtesy tabs, how to make your own box, and cold storage; but the passion for the work I found could only be sparked by diving into the work, a caring curator, and a natural love for a work I have become passionate about.
When I began my Internship the only thing I knew for certain was that I would have to work 120 hours, now I know so much more.

Internship Complete

After 120 hours of serving as an intern for the O. Winston Link/Historical Society of Western Virginia Museum, I can say I learned a lot of about the skills, techniques, and business behind museums. Experiences I had included: setting up an exhibit, packing and handling artifacts, organizing/moving artifacts, condition reporting, and so much more. I did not expect such a hands-on and involved experience, but I am grateful that I worked with a supervisor who allowed me to get my hands dirty and take on real projects (rather than just giving out busy work). If this internship leaves any impression about working in/for museums, it’s that there is always much to do and the kid-like fascination with history is always useful and enjoyable when working among artifacts. Even with all the headaches that may come from relying on sponsors or donors for funding, dealing with board members, and/or any other obstacle that may arise, working in a museum allows historical enthusiasts to get creative to tell stories that are meaningful to the museum or to the locality/person the museum represents. The museum’s nature to embrace creativity is an appealing factor when I consider my future career choices and possibilities; this was an incredible experience that I look forward to looking back on in my professional future.

Work in the archives is something I had already had a taste of before this internship. My Historical Methods paper was based almost entirely of off work done in the school’s archives. This was work I remember enjoying much more than any other typical mode of research.

I had not given this a second thought until I began work in the museum’s archives. The work in this lonely room does not appear as exciting, but I immediately took a liking to it. Work in the archives can include some items that you may know very little about, but it can involve items that you know very well. Because of this I learned more from the newspapers, photographs, and maps I handled than I ever would have thought. This constant stream of new information from the archives is another reason I preferred working there. Working in an organization’s archives is now something that I know I’d like to do, and it is something that brings me more joy than I once would have thought.

Archival Work

“Everything is a priority here.” When my supervisor, curator Ashley Webb, said this to me, the message really resonated as I put on my gloves to sort through archival artifacts. Although museums may seem like history set in stone, there is much work going on behind the scenes every day to organize and be able to present and use these pieces of history to tell the stories of the past. The museum’s most recent exhibition is an example of the importance of being able to access the museum’s organized possessions to contribute to future exhibits. When the museum received the Lewis Hine collection on loan, our supervisor and curator created a part in the Hine exhibition for photographs by Hine that the museum already owned, adding local historical commentary on Virginia history. This internship excites me to work in the field of public history because this field requires hard work that is rewarded through the use of creativity and the field’s contribution to history.