Settling In

So I am finally getting settled in Syracuse and today is the first day at my new internship at the Warehouse Gallery, part of the Syracuse University Art Galleries, located in the downtown area of Syracuse.

This internship is a departure from what I would have looked for had I stayed in DC this semester.

First of all, this museum is an art gallery and I have never really aspired to work in an art gallery, mostly because I love history so much and I have absolutely no background in art theory or art history. And not only is this museum an art gallery, but it is a living art gallery, which means we're working with live artists who plan their own instillations in the gallery. Which brings me to...

Second of all, it looks like there will be relatively little design work such as I am used to. As the artists design their own installations, there isn't much 'exhibit design' to do, though I believe that there may be some brochure graphics to work on at some point.

The exciting part (and I hope it really does turn out to be exciting), is that I think I'll get the chance to work with/ under the new preparator, who starts in three weeks. Here is where some design work might come in, as well as the chance to physically work on the next show installation, which will take place the first couple of weeks in November. Since I have been out of town for the past two weeks, I missed the installation and opening of the current show, but hope to be more involved with the next.

For now, it looks like I will be more involved with the social media aspects of the gallery, trying to successfully transition their fans to their new fan page and offer suggestions for their website.

I have already passed on some information on Omeka, a public open-source design tool that I learned about in my technolgoy class last semester, and we'll see if this is somewhere that they want to and are able to go. If they are, that would be a great project for me to work on as it is design and content related, but a lot of it depends on what kind of server they have, if they even have one at all.

I will try to post an entry about once a week to keep everyone up to date on my continued internship experience as I work towards a December graduation!

Lessons Learned Part III

Lessons about…finished products

8. Many problems don’t surface until after installation
This is a very common occurrence in the exhibit design field and I would say that the majority of it is because you can never know how an audience will experience your finished product. You can have the best laid plans in the world, but if a key area is too dark or a kiosk is awkwardly placed and visitors are discouraged from looking at something as a result, then your exhibit is affected. The average attention span of a museum visitor is 15 minutes or less per gallery so you don’t want anything to deter, detract, or confuse the visitor or you risk them leaving the gallery and not seeing anything.

Of course, experience in the field and familiarity of what has worked in the past and what hasn’t will go a long way and designers learn how to tackle some would be design issues before the fabrication phase. But something is always bound to come up that you did not expect.

For example, shortly after I started at NASM, a revamp of the Mars corner in a gallery was installed. The new section had updated graphic panels, amazing images, nifty videos and a few artifacts. During the first week of installation, Ashley and I took half an hour to go down to the gallery and just sit and watch to see how people reacted and what they did. Some of the things we witnessed were so surprising! Which leads me to lesson #9…

9. Always spend time in your gallery space
This is important both at the beginning of any newly opened space and periodically throughout the life of the exhibit.

In the case of the Mars corner, we saw kids leaping down a safety ramp, hanging on artifact cases mounted on a wall, punching every monitor they came to as if it was a touch screen, even if it clearly wasn’t, and completely bypassing an area with a really cool video. It was obvious that there were some changes that needed to be made to make the area safer for visitors, provide clearer instructions, and to protect the exhibit artifacts. Unfortunately this process usually involves extra work by fabrication staff, which costs more money, but is often a necessity.

As a safeguard against these changes, every exhibit budget should have a built in 10% contingency amount, because inevitably, things will come up that you haven’t expected.

An Update

So it looks like I have finally gotten some details worked out regarding my next internship, and my life, for that matter.

Originally my wife and I thought it would be in our best interest for her to move to Syracuse in August and for me to finish up my classes and internship here in DC and then move to New York in December. But after sitting down and crunching the numbers, we decided that it made much more sense financially for us to stick together and to avoid paying rent in two places. Even though we will be replacing my income with hers rather than gaining a second salary, the cost of living in Syracuse is much lower than in DC which will make it much easier to make ends meet. I have to admit, while it has been a good decision for me to work for GW and receive tuition benefits, it was still quite difficult for two people (both in school) to live off of one base salary in the DC area.

So, we are moving my wife up to NY tomorrow and I will follow in a couple of weeks. We have been super busy this week between trying to pack up the necessities for her (since I will be keeping all of the furniture for the next two weeks) and painting our current apartment. Our cats have had a blast with the jungle gym of furniture that we had to create in order to make room for painting [*note to self—never try to paint a one bedroom apartment with the furniture still in it].

As for my internship, I have secured a position with the Syracuse University Art Galleries, with their design team, which I think will a great experience. I’m not exactly sure what I will be doing yet, but in my phone interview with their director, we discussed my interest in exhibit graphics and space planning, as well as fabrication. I haven’t done much fabrication, outside of a painting for my first exhibit design class, but I know it would be tremendously useful for the design process to understand the materials and what goes into building an exhibit. The director did emphasize that he wanted to make sure that my experience at the art galleries enhanced my degree and gave me the experience I want, so I feel confident that I will gain some valuable insight with this internship. I will be meeting with the director and some of the designers on staff during my first week up in Syracuse and hopefully I will start soon after that!

I plan to continue to blog during my coming internship, since it is still part of my GW degree and I will also be taking an online class to finish my coursework requirements.

All in all, lots of exciting and new experiences coming my way!

Lessons Learned Part II

My internship search in the Syracuse area is a bit crazy and up in the air right now, made a bit more difficult by some frustrating rules from GW. I’ll update more once I have some more concrete news, but for now, let’s go back and explore some more lessons learned at NASM…

Lessons about…day to day work

5. Every project takes at least 2 hours longer than you think it will---usually it takes two days longer
Ashley passed me this bit of wisdom about a month into my internship and I have a feeling that I will be passing it on to my own interns or students one day because it is true.

Since I was on a limited schedule at NASM (existing of only about 3 hours of work a day), it was sometimes hard to get into the groove of working on a project. With creative projects, I’ve found that I often work a bit like my car in winter—slow to warm up and shift into the correct gear, but capable of long trips after that. Sometimes I just need a bit of time to get in the right gears to be productive. The result at NASM, though, was that I occasionally felt like I had just gotten started when I had to leave my work to go to a meeting. I remember showing up several times thinking that I would be able to finish a project by the time I left that day. But when all was said and done, and my three hours were up, I was usually not nearly as close to finishing as I thought I would be.

On top of this, once projects are completed, they have to go through an approval process, often several proof processes, and then finally a production stage before the work can get on the floor.

As a perfect example, I finished a visitor services sign the week before I left that was supposed to inform visitors that they could carry water bottles with them, but that all other food and drink had to be thrown out before they entered the museum.



Three weeks later I got an email from Ashley showing just how badly they needed to get their signs up!



Occasionally, a project would get out with just a couple of days turnaround, but this was typically controlled by the staff in charge of the approval process more than the designers.

6. Sometimes you need a little GLEE
As a designer, sometimes the task is pretty mundane. For example, one of my major projects was to manipulate basic Illustrator line drawings into a drawing format that could be read by a router and cut out as a 3-D tactile display. The final product was made of metal and the front view of the airplane in each one had to be a cut out that showed depth and allowed visitors to feel the shape of the plane. Once I figured out how to visualize what the 3-D final product would look like, manipulating the line drawings was not hard, but it was very time consuming.

On these days, a little music went a long way. My favorite soundtrack at the time was Volume 1 and 2 of GLEE, which I plugged into my IPod and rocked out to as I worked. Others in the office used their music to get them started each day and IPods and Pandora are common.

7. The proof is in the…proof
Because most computer monitors are not calibrated, the color you see on the monitor usually does not match the color that will print. Printing materials, as well as gallery lighting, can also affect how a color looks on display. For this reason alone, printing proofs is extremely important, but proofs also give you an opportunity to pick up on design discrepancies, misspellings, and poor image quality. The proof stage is also vital because it gives the entire team (designers, writers, editors, curators) a chance to look at your work and make comments and suggestions. This is also the time when a lot of dialogue and creative thinking can take place between colleagues. At NASM the hallway en route to the exhibits offices showcased works up for proofs and it was always fun to stop and check out the progress. As an intern, it also gave me a lot of opportunities to notice how good the designers were, and to give me something to work towards!

Up Next: Lessons learned about finished products

Change of Plans

My wife was recently offered a year-long fellowship in Syracuse, New York. She started the application process back in April and we didn’t know what her chances were or when we might know for sure if she would get it. At that point, I was still in the middle of my internship at Air and Space and hadn’t really thought too far ahead towards my next internship or what the fellowship might do to our short term life plans. In June, about the time I was finishing up at NASM, she was invited for a phone interview with the director of the fellowship and then shortly afterwards invited for a second phone interview with the team of graduate students already on the project. At this point, it started to seem like there was a real possibility that she would get the fellowship, which prompted us to start thinking about what the opportunity would mean for us.

The possibility of her (and eventually me) moving to Syracuse caused me to do some rethinking of my academic plan. As I’ve mentioned earlier, at the end of my internship at NASM, I was mentally exhausted from the long days and long hours that resulted from me juggling school, work, and an internship. I was really dreading jumping back into a crazy schedule again and was silently hoping for a reason to not have to start until at least the fall.

In addition, after a couple of weeks in a normal schedule, I realized how much happier I was when I was not tired and anxious all the time. There was definitely a marked improvement in our home relationship as well now that we had time to talk to each other and do things together.

So I started thinking, that if the fellowship worked out, perhaps I would delay my graduation until May 2011, finish my coursework this fall, and then finish my final internship in the Syracuse area next Spring. I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would get some good news!

And finally, with just three weeks until the start of the fellowship, my wife was offered the position!

It’s pretty crazy to think that she will be leaving so soon and it will definitely be a challenge to be apart so much of the time. Especially since we haven’t been married that long and we haven’t been apart more than a couple of weeks in the last 3 years. But it is an amazing career opportunity for her and after it ends, it puts us in a much better place to make some decisions about what to do next (on our radar is a year-long working holiday in New Zealand, a relocation to Portland or Denver, or her enrolling in a PhD program somewhere).

Now my job is to find an internship in the Syracuse area. I’ve already emailed my advisors to see if they have any recommendations and to find out about the process of doing my internship away from DC, and now I’m just waiting to hear back.

I think until then, a Google search will be the best place to start.

Lessons Learned Part 1 (cont)

Lessons from…the Exhibit Team (cont)

3. It takes a village
There is a lot of talent involved in making an exhibit. At a small museum this talent may have to be divided between 3 or 4 people. In a large museum the talent is distributed in more specialized areas and there might be 15-20 people involved. If I remember my numbers correctly, on the Time and Navigation team there were 4 curators, 2 designers (one graphic designer and one CAD designer), 2 educators, a fundraising or development manager, an editor/ writer, a project manager, and several other people (fabricators, AV specialists, department heads, archivists) who popped in and out to various meetings. On top of this there is a whole production crew that usually gets involved once the plans are basically complete. That’s a whole lot of people!

And while too many cooks in the kitchen can be a bad thing, as long as everyone has an open mind and perspective on the final goal, teamwork is a GREAT thing when producing exhibits.

4. Poll the audience
One week, the Time and Nav team visited the National Archives to learn about some of the technology that they have used in their exhibits. During the briefing we learned that they don’t do audience testing or polling because federal regulations prevent them. Apparently for federally funded organizations, any poll or question that is asked to more than 9 people needs special federal approval. Since a poll of 9 people is essentially useless in gathering pertinent information, they don’t do it.

As a quasi-funded institution, the Smithsonian doesn’t have such limitations, and it’s a good thing since evaluating the audience is a key step in testing concepts and components of the exhibit.

As part of the Time and Nav process, the Education department conducted several surveys of museum visitors, asking questions about prior content knowledge, interest levels, and even the understandability of certain key sentences from the script. The answers were integral in making sure that the script tailored to the areas of most interest to the audience and helped them see when a concept (clear to an academic or specialist) needs to be broken down and explained further.

Up next: Lessons about day to day work

Lessons Learned Part 1

As I continue my search for my second internship, I thought I’d take some time to talk about my general observations and lessons learned from my first internship at NASM. My internship was the perfect jump back into the museum design world and despite the hectic schedule, I loved every minute that I spent in the 3rd floor Exhibits Department.

Part one: Lessons on…the Exhibits Team

1. Exhibits take a long time to plan

I was privileged to be able to sit in on team meetings for the developing exhibit “Time and Navigation”, which featured weekly meetings with designers, curators, writers, and educators to discuss concepts, scripts, fundraising, and design. I was present for about six months worth of meetings and during this time it seems like progress was good. However, I gathered from the discussions that this exhibit has been in development for about 10 years and the direction of the content has changed many times. 10 years!

I am glad that my time at the museum coincided with a time when the exhibit really did seem to be moving forward. Not only did the team reach its fundraising goal, but the distribution of funds put an absolute timeline on the project, meaning that there was a timeline for the dismantling of the previous exhibit as well as the construction phase for the new one. I think this timeline really helped the team push forward in the script development, since it is the basis of so many other decisions involving design, lighting, collections, and interactives.

However, even with the forward moving progress, the nature of an exhibit with an institution as large as the Smithsonian is such that the exhibit still isn’t scheduled to open until late 2011, early 2012.

2. Design is intricately tied to the script

Often design is guided by a finished script, and projects, especially graphic panel based exhibits, come to the design department with a clear starting point. At this point it is the designer’s responsibility to take the script and make it interesting and fluid from a visitor’s perspective. This can be achieved with thoughtful space planning and traffic flow or it can be achieved graphically. Often it is both. Usually much of the script is inflexible and the designer must think creatively about how to best present the ideas.

Sometimes, a designer is involved in the entire process of the exhibit and has input in the script along the way. From what I have observed, this is the preferred method of operation, but it does make a designer’s job a challenge. In the early stages of an exhibit the designer often has little solid work because the concepts are still being hammered out in the script. Without at least a good solid foundation, space planning and graphics are hard to visualize and you don’t want to do too much work on a concept that may change in the near future.

At the same time, a designers input can be instrumental in helping the curators grasp how concepts will come across to visitors. Sometimes a suggestion on how graphic panels or an interactive component will actually be placed in the gallery can help a curator realize what their most important concepts are and help them better define them in the script so the concept, and its importance, is easy to understand.

Overall the process requires balance and teamwork.

Next: More lessons on the Exhibit Team

A Lack of Motivation

I seem to be in a bit of a motivation slump at the moment. Part of it might be the weather (my computer telling me it’s over 100 degrees outside doesn’t exactly spur me into frenzied action), but I suspect most of it is contributed to a bit of mental exhaustion.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I had to catch a pre-7:00am bus to get to my internship by 7:45. After three hours at NASM, I embarked on my daily 30 minute walk to the GWU campus for work, and then commenced an eight hour workday, leaving campus around 7:30 at night. Once a week I had class, and twice a week I had to commute home by metro and bus, walking in the door of my apartment around 9:00 at night. Perhaps twice a week my fiancé and I would make it to the gym, and then get home with enough time to eat a quick dinner, talk for a few minutes, and fall into bed.

The previous semester, I had juggled a very similar schedule in order to take two studio interior design classes, both of which were held during the day, rather than at night.

Now, I absolutely think that the crazy schedule was worth it—I loved my interior design classes and learned so much that will be extremely useful in my career, and my internship experience was everything that I had hoped for.

But regardless of the worth of it all, I reached the last day of my internship and the last class of the first summer session breathing a sigh of relief to finally have a bit of a break. For at least one week I would have a normal 8:30 – 5:00 day, have time to go to the gym before dark, time to make and eat dinner with my fiancé, and time to enjoy some free time.

That was a week and four days ago and I am no closer to finding a second internship than I was in March. I don’t think it is for a lack of trying since I have been persistent in my emails with a design firm in Fairfax that say they want to meet with me, but that haven’t replied to my many emails telling them my availability. I know that in the very near future I will have to start the search over again and I know the day is fast approaching where I will have to go back to a crazy schedule if I even have a hope of finishing my degree by December.

As of right now I have my old list of internship possibilities and contacts on my desk, I have a small network of professionals at Air and Space whom I can call on for recommendations and referrals, and number 2 on my To-Do list is “Find and internship”.

But all I want to do right now is breath…

Landing my first internship

After failing to land an internship during my first summer in DC, I was determined that I would have one secured before the end of the fall semester.

As some background, I am on a 2 year, 2 semester plan in my program, facilitated by the need to work while in school, and because of this I won’t be able to finish my degree until December 2010. I had originally thought that I could somehow finish up my course work by the end of summer 2010, then stop working and be able to focus on two back to back full time internships or two simultaneous part time internships. However, with my fiancé also a full time graduate student and a post-graduation job not a guarantee, I realized that it was necessary for me to keep working and to try to find a way to do an internship while still fitting in my 40 hours a week for work.

An internship for my program requires 260 hours of time and because of my work schedule there was no way that I would be able to put in more than 12 hours a week at an internship. When I did the math, it broke down to about 6 months per placement—which meant that I would have to start an internship by January, then go directly into another internship in July in order to finish by December. With this in mind I started searching.

Well, in actuality, I didn’t search as much as contact. I used one of the few museum professional contacts I had made the previous year—an exhibit designer at the National Air and Space Museum who had been my professor for my very first class at GW. Having been part of a small group of students who took on an extra design project for our student exhibit, I had spent my Sunday evenings at the museum and had felt like I had made a good connection with our professor. At the very least, I thought she would remember me in her sea of students.

In October I emailed her, inquiring if the exhibits department would need an intern starting in January. I contacted her early because I didn’t want to get beat out by any of the students that she had in class that semester. I got lucky and that one connection was all that I needed. She remembered me and told me they would need an intern. Then as icing on the cake, she informed me that they had just hired a Museum Studies graduate and it turned out to be Ashley, who I had taken classes with and had gotten to know fairly well the past year.

I was really excited to be working with Ashley. Not only could we relate over GW stories, but I also had a tremendous respect for her design talent. I think I got really lucky being paired with someone who understood exactly where I was coming from and where I wanted to end up after school, and who understood exactly how to tailor my internship experience to make sure that I learned the skills and got the insight that would really help me in the future.

And so, on January 4, with a massive head cold, I caught the 6:56am bus from my apartment and arrived at NASM excited for what was to come.

Networking

I hear it all the time in the Career Center—one of the surest ways to find a job is to network.

According to dictionary.com, a network

is an association of individuals having a common interest, formed to provide mutual assistance, helpful information, or the like

Used as a verb in a professional context, networking

is used to cultivate people who can be helpful to one professionally, esp. in finding employment or moving to a higher position

Networking is so successful because it puts a face to a person’s qualifications; if I came up to you at a cocktail party and we connected over our shared interest in museum technology, and then you told me that your museum is looking for a new web editor and that I should apply, then BINGO, I have made myself and my resume more visible in your selection process because someone at the museum can say that they remembered talking to me.

Of course, more often than not, a job suggestion will not fall into your lap with every professional conversation you have, but the point of networking is to get your name out there to the people in your field who you might end up working with in the future. The more contacts you have, the more likely you are to hear through the grapevine that a particular company or organization is hiring. If you can go further in your initial meeting and exchange business cards, then you have an at-the-ready contact that you can reference anytime you need to in the future.

Now, I have to admit that networking is not my strength. I am shy and introverted and am drained after an hour or so of small talk in a crowd that I’m not familiar with. I tend to shy away from social situations where I don’t know people and I have a hard time promoting myself and my accomplishments because of a fear that the other person won’t be interested in hearing what I have to say.

However, just because I’m not comfortable with standard networking, it doesn’t mean that I can’t still successfully network. Instead of signing up for networking events, I try to accept invitations to events where I know at least one or two people. In these situations, at least I have the comfort of one person to talk to, and I am more comfortable and confident meeting new people if there is someone else around to share the conversation burden. I also try to foster a good relationship with any professional that I do have a reason to come in contact with—for example, a professor or a guest speaker that I feel at ease talking with because I am able to get to know them more gradually in a group setting.

In fact, the latter technique is exactly how I managed to land my first internship at the National Air and Space Museum.

Up next: How I finially landed my first internship

Finding an Internship

Now that we're aquainted, let's talk internships!

Finding an internship can be a challenge—especially in DC in the summer, especially when competing with students coming from all over the country, especially when everyone in my program (museum studies) is searching for an internship too. If I multiply these factors by my own personal expectations, the field gets narrower. If I add in the fact that I have very little experience in my field outside of my class work, I start to wonder if anyone would even be interested in having me as an intern. In addition, as a full time GWU employee, I have to wonder if anyone will be willing to work with my crazy schedule.

Luckily, my first internship has been a great experience, but it was a little nerve-wracking getting there.

The Museum Studies program requires two internships of 260 hours, which equals 6 credits towards my degree. When I met with our internship coordinator she told me that I should look for two different organizations to intern for (for example, if I did my first internship at a Smithsonian museum, I should look for my second at a non-Smithsonian location). She also told me that I should try to secure my dream internship as my second experience, because if they liked my work and had any positions open I would be in a much better place for hire after graduation. Then she gave me a list of museums and organization in the DC area who had worked with our students in the past.

With these tips in mind, I started my internship search last spring, trying to determine if there would be a way to marry my work and class schedule with time to do an internship for that coming summer. I started by systematically looking up each organization on my list to determine if I would enjoy interning there. I found a few that sounded like a good fit for either my undergraduate academic interests in biology and history or my future career goals and I zoned in on my ‘dream’ placement to keep in mind for my second internship. I sent out emails to the contacts for my top choices and wound up with three interviews: one with the design department at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), one with the Exhibits department at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and one with the Exhibits department at the National Geographic Museum.

In the end, I like to say that those first contacts and subsequent meetings were a learning opportunity for me; I had to face two of my biggest concerns, my limited schedule and my own expectations, right off the bat and I realized that trying to navigate the design world with little knowledge of what to expect was challenging.

For the NIH, the largest hurdle was the commute—it took me almost an hour and a half to get there from my apartment in Alexandria—and it would not have been practical to make that kind of commute fit in with my work schedule. On top of that, the exhibits department had a very small budget and minimal part time staff. In some instances, a small staff and budget can be a great opportunity for an intern to be really involved and see their work really come to fruition. In other cases, it can be a bit of a scattered working environment. With my only exhibit design experience coming from my class work, I felt like I really needed more guidance than they could give. Strike One.

Next I met with the National Geographic Museum. They were interviewing for two interns who could share a work space. Unfortunately they wanted someone who was available to work 9:00am – 5:00pm two days a week, plus a half day. Coupled with my internal disappointment at the small number of exhibits actually present in the museum, this opportunity was not going to work out either. Strike Two.

Lastly, I met with the head designer at the NMNH. While my schedule didn’t seem like an issue, they didn’t have the design opportunities that I was looking for. Each Smithsonian operates differently and some contract out their design work, while some have an exhibits department in-house. NMNH contracted out and I didn’t have the skills for the kind of design work that they did do in-house. They offered me a more development/research based opportunity working with an exhibit’s online component, but at that point in my studies, I really felt like I needed the more design-focused experience for my long term career goals. It would have been a great opportunity, but with limited time to in my life to focus on my internships, I needed to make sure that each one was a perfect fit for my career path. Strike Three.

During the process of interviewing, I realized that I was actually fairly unprepared. My resume had been tailored to finding my job at GW and while I had tweaked it to reflect my design experience, I realized that I didn’t have enough experience to look exceptional and the experience I did have was not highlighted correctly. I also did not have a portfolio since I had never had a design job or internship before. It was clear that I had a lot of work to do before I tried to interview again.

It seems that an internship that summer just wasn’t meant to be.

Next post: The importance of networking.

Who? What? Why?

Just to start us off, here is a little bit about me and why I decided to start this blog:

About me:
I am a second year graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, working on my M.A. in Museum Studies with a concentration in Exhibition Development and Design. I am also a full time GW employee, working in the GW Career Center in the Career Learning and Experiences Department. I am a native of Virginia, though I’m new to the Washington DC area.

Purpose:
The purpose of this blog is to provide a student perspective on the internship process and internship experience. Internships are a big part of GWU and they are an even bigger part of Washington DC culture. Each year thousands of students descend on Washington for the opportunity to work alongside congressmen, intern with non-profits, and pursue opportunities with private companies. This blog will discuss my own internship experience, and hopefully provide insightful tips into navigating the complex world of being an intern, a student, and a staff member, as well as keeping a perspective on my personal life.