The James Monroe Museum
My internship journey so far has been chock-full of irreplicable experiences. While I was originally supposed to work with a different museum, due to many reasons they are no longer hosting their internship program for this summer. However, the James Monroe Museum has kindly taken me under their wing and let me explore so many opportunities that I never would have been able to otherwise.
My supervisor, Lindsey Crawford, has allowed me to explore my interests in Indigenous Studies in the museum field. I have been able to plan the Native American History Month’s content for this year, which has been exciting and challenging. There is more work involved in planning programs for a museum than I previously realized. For example, it took a month of research and meetings to decide on what period of Indigenous history the museum should highlight for a month of content. I researched several different ideas (that have since culminated into an eleven-page document that will probably be used for future research papers) before we finally decided on one topic that we thought would best highlight current issues as well as leave space for a call to action (which everyone will just have to wait and see during November when the programming starts!).
After deciding on a topic, we then had to figure out the best way to present this information to the public, which also took a few weeks of planning. With all of this planning and research we decided that it was best to separate the information into small, bite-sized chunks that were easy for visitors and our followers on social media to digest. After coming to these conclusions, I was then tasked with creating a “Monroe Minute” and a blog post. A Monroe Minute is a short one-to-two-minute video narrated by me detailing an event that occurred during James Monroe’s life or, in this instance, presidency, as well as highlighting the impact that it continues to have.
This really challenged me because I had to learn how to use Adobe Spark to create the video, and that is a platform I was unfamiliar with prior to this internship. Now, though, I am excited that this is a new skill that I can put on my resume. The blog post was equally challenging but in a different way. The post was more like a short essay comprising of 1,500 words going into more detail about the events and impact that were discussed in the Monroe Minute. Now, we are working on finding a guest speaker for the Native American History Month program who can assist and highlight the museum’s goals in diversifying the voices and histories that they tell. I am so excited to see how the program turns out and what the rest of my internship holds!