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.