Posts
During the fall 2014 semester I was
an intern at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. I worked in the
programming department, which meant that there were a lot of spreadsheets and
Word documents.
Honestly, though, I really enjoyed
it. I’ve had internships before; I’ve already been a docent and helped with
research at historic sites. This particular internship was a chance to see the
business side of a museum. Museums thrive on tours and visitors, but how
exactly do you get people not only interested in visiting, but physically
there? The answer shouldn’t be surprising to any college student: It was a
whole lot of research, scheduling, and planning. And typing.
Sometimes,
a whole lot of folders, too.
I didn’t have an ongoing project per se, but the theme of my work seemed
to be tours and events. The Clara Barton Missing Soldier’s Office had recently
opened and needed more crowds, so I looked into tour companies that were
historically based or that came to the Washington, D.C. area. Later I had to get
some data for the tours that took place between April 1 and October 24 of 2014.
Another week it was my job to call and email national parks in the area to see
if they would be interested in hosting Civil War Talks. For a couple weeks I
just looked at tour bus company profiles and decided if they were the right fit
for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. I also updated the museum site’s
calendar with some upcoming events. All the events were for 2015. One event was
for September, and much of the calendar
was already full.
This
is where you find all your tour and charter bus needs.
That’s probably not that
mind-blowing to any event planners out there, but it was pretty eye opening for
me. I’m a history major, and like most history majors I think mainly in books
and primary sources. Hands-on research is what I’m used to. Museums are a place
to present history and the results of research, but you need to catch the
public’s interest to keep a place running. So that’s what I learned over that
semester: the amount of scheduling, networking, and planning involved in
booking tours and hosting events is a massive amount of work. It also keeps
museums going.
