Category: Recipient of Steven M. Bunson ’82 Internship Fund in the Arts

Overall, I have mixed feelings about my internship due to the mixed experience. Since I was split between two different areas and skillsets within the same building, I made less progress exploring either than I originally hoped.

While my archival work proved fruitful, I am just finishing the mass inventory and categorization. If I had been in that space 3 or 4 times a week instead, I would have been able to plumb my interest in archival work further. Conversely, if I had spent more time in the New Orleans Jazz Museum, I would have grown more accustomed to planning and management, marketing strategies, and the development of the Museum.

Nonetheless, I was interested in both parts of the Museum, so I feel that the depth vs. width tradeoff was necessary, if not regrettable. Working in the archives has still forced me to think about historical categorization in significant ways, and I hope I get to keep working or volunteering in the field.

I believe this internship has helped cement that my writing and synthesis skills need to be a part of my job. Even if it is not the kind of writing I am familiar with, it was a bit of a fun puzzle writing newsletters and memos to potential donors. I had to excerpt all the vital pieces of information, order them properly, and ensure that all my descriptions were concise. In the past, I have struggled to keep my writing brief, so it was refreshing to have the professional and creative boundary that short-form writing provides.

At the same time, I have also learned that I enjoy having some kind of long-term goal to work towards. Many of my projects in the Museum were self-contained, so I spent one to two days working on them and finished. However, some of the work I found most engaging was exploring how the Museum will conduct its Gala auction later in the year. I worked with the Museum’s Squarespace website to best design forms and spreadsheets collecting information about donations, and I assessed auction websites for best results. I did not anticipate these tasks pulling me in, but I think the feeling of the different functions building on each other was a satisfying progression for me. In my future internships, work, and academic life, I will have to experiment with more ways to monitor my own goals and progression to best enhance my work.

If another student were interested in an internship at the Jazz Museum, I would recommend committing to a single field in most cases. And above all else, ask for work whenever you can! The Jazz Museum has a relaxed work environment, but most of the staff have so many different jobs that even taking one to two extra small 15-minute tasks a day helps everybody. Plus, it opens communications and makes sure that if your supervisor hears about a job, you are on their radar as a potential candidate.

For students interested in the field, I would highly recommend attaching goals to all tasks you receive. While it seems simple, it is easy to fall into the trap of compiling information for no exact purpose. Suddenly, you have thirty quotes when you needed four and the editing time has shot up from 30 minutes to 3 hours.

This review sounds more negative than my genuine opinions on the internship due to the way I criticize myself and my work, so I will end by discussing the work for which I feel most proud. My work in the Museum has been the most eye-opening for me since I have found new fields to which my skills apply. My time in the museum has also helped me analyze my work patterns; however, in terms of accomplishment, my work in the archives is my best.

As of the writing of this blog post, I have categorized over 1,500 items in the Louisiana Historical Center, and I am satisfied with that. The quantity is relevant of course but feeling out the process and finding both the fun and rhythm within the work has been a key takeaway from this internship.

So far, I have found enjoyment in unexpected avenues working in both the New Orleans Jazz Museum and the Louisiana Historical Center (LHC). I have been rewarded for many of the skills and behaviors I have built during my academic life, but these rewards are typically for skills I have discounted.

For instance, in my work in the LHC, I primarily work on data entry related to map collection. Surprisingly, I believe my time working with historical documents and writing papers has made me significantly better at finding and correcting discrepancies between finding aids, labels, and the maps these tools are meant to help researchers navigate. Although history is not the field most associated with spreadsheets, the ability to efficiently scan and prioritize the right portions of maps and their associated text has been invaluable.

Within the Museum, I have been primarily writing marketing material and collating important copy related to the Museum. Although I typically use these skills to decide what portion of an 18th-century French diary is useful for my paper, the same ability is valuable when treating Jazz Museum reports as source texts. It is gratifying to see these skills transferring, even if it’s not the same kind of academic writing as my student life.

Overall, I am very pleased with my work at the Museum even if it was not precisely what I expected. I came into this job with a hazy idea of what the backroom work of a museum looked like, and through my own work as well as attending meetings on development, exhibits, and marketing, I’ve widened my understanding.

Although my work in the archives has been enjoyable, I complete the same tasks over my days. Because of this, I am interested in exploring diverse kinds of archival work in addition to the kind of work I have already completed. How might I directly engage with researchers? How do archives go about searching for and acquiring new items? This internship serves as a great foot in the door to begin finding avenues to some answers to these questions.

Above all else, communicating clearly and concisely has been integral to this internship. Even though I may only spend 10 minutes a day checking in with my superiors or writing emails, this internship has lifted the importance of logistics in my eyes. To begin any project, you do not need a long meeting, but you need that meeting to be well planned. If I were to sum this skill up as a lesson, I would say that even if you only send a two-sentence long email, the 20 seconds it takes to write that email can advance your projects more than hours of work if you send it to the right person at the right time.

In the archives, I have had to devise systems to ensure I log information about maps efficiently, and I’ve found the process of grappling with organizational systems surprisingly interesting. I have improved a lot at using different sort functions on Excel to best cross-reference my new inventory with past finding aids.

Since I also primarily work by myself within the archives, I have had a lot of time to feel out my own workflow and regulate my time. I have kept a lot better track of my productivity in terms of maps logged vs. time spent, and I think improving time management and awareness is useful in all professional capacities. The first step in addressing problems in my academic workflow, my focus while reading, or administrative work for my e-board is setting a standard by which I can evaluate my performance.

(This is a photo of me and Legislator Gerardo together)

The organization I will be working for this summer is the office of legislator Oriana Gerardo, the youngest female to hold office in the municipality of Yauco, Puerto Rico. I will be working with her to develop projects for her constituents. Legislator Gerardo’s mission is to provide programs for the people that elected her that will help them in their everyday lives and represent their needs to the larger government on the island. I will specifically be working to develop a program called “Arts for All”. It is an outreach into the artistic community of Yauco to provide artists with the space and encouragement to create with the goal of collecting resources and raising awareness for various causes like cleaning up the beaches, moving towards more sustainable resources, recruiting more women into politics. Throughout the summer, we will be drafting proposals and building the program’s framework. The goal is to propose the fully mapped out program to the committee at the end of the summer. In addition I will be reaching out to artists and essentially brainstorming projects with them that will promote social awareness and change.

During my first month as an intern with Legislator Gerardo. I learned that in her municipality in Puerto Rico she handles more of the budget rather than actual law making. I have begun to speak to different artists in Yauco, PR and asking them about political issues they are passionate about. Many of the artists have expressed their desire to become a state and have their voices properly accounted for in the U.S. government. In addition they are very passionate about keeping the environment clean and are concerned about climate change. With all of the natural disasters that Puerto Rico has endured in the last few years, it is vital that as a community they do not contribute to worsening global conditions. Many artists have pushed for companies to reduce their carbon footprint and Co2 emissions. I have begun to ask if they would be interested in integrating their political views into their art. So far, I have gotten mixed reactions where some artists are hesitant because they feel they want their art to reach and spread to everyone and are afraid of having political dissenters deem their art “too political”. However there are artists that are interested in integrating their political opinions into their art and others that are interested in using their artistic talents to raise money to support political campaigns that align with their views.

This past month I have learned a lot about Puerto Rico’s politics and I have been spending a lot of time with Legislator Gerardo and learning about her role in her municipal government. It is an amazing opportunity because she is the youngest female legislator in her district and maybe in Puerto Rico as a whole. I am very excited to start this out reach program and learn more about the politics of Puerto Rico.

This summer, I’m equal parts invested in and intrigued by my opportunity to work for the New Orleans Jazz Museum. The Museum is a state-run institution located in the historic French Quarter district of New Orleans dedicated to celebrating the history of Jazz through educational workshops, live performances, and exhibits. At the same time, the Jazz Museum is home to the Louisiana Historical Center (LHC), the largest archive on the history of Louisiana stretching from the colonial period to now. As a history student with an interest in museum studies and public history, I believe that the Jazz Museum is a perfect place to intern in order to learn about how a museum organizes and develops its public-facing programs.

As an intern, my work is split between the Museum and the LHC, with the two areas comprising fairly distinct work within these first three weeks. Within the Museum, I most often find myself writing & collecting copy, creating marketing materials, and editing and updating Museum reports. Although I’m not currently creating one large cohesive project, this kind of work demonstrates how many avenues the Museum ends up exploring. Because of this, the Museum values succinct and widely applicable descriptions and explanations of events and material that can be edited and shared across multiple platforms and documents to reduce the need to rewrite and reinvent constantly. In the future, I will be working with multiple staff members and interns on designing material for the NOLA River Festival, a festival designed to celebrate the role of the Mississippi in New Orleans’ life.

Over this summer, I want to explore how my writing and organizational skills transfer to museum work along with how I can build new skills. Sometimes the work environment is chaotic in the Museum with so many different people being pulled into new projects, and I’m hoping to learn new ways to track project development.

Within the LHC, my primary project at the moment is a comprehensive inventory of the LHC’s maps. With maps being sent to new collections, exhibits, and other museums, it is essential that the LHC has full knowledge of the status and whereabouts of all its material. To this end, I am going through multiple flat files of maps and comparing the maps found within to the maps listed on the Center’s finding aids, tools used by researchers, librarians, and archivists to easily locate documents. While this job is not particularly flashy, it is absolutely crucial as this kind of survey of the map collection has not been performed since 2011. As of this blog’s writing, I have recorded information on around 400 maps, and I am hardly a quarter of the way done. In many ways the work is solitary, but it also means that I get to spend two days a week recording information about some really fascinating maps. I think the most important question I want to begin to answer over this internship is “how do you make material found in museums and archives more accessible to researchers and the public physically and virtually?”

This summer has made me come to terms with the fears involved with working in the “real world.” A world where adulting is the norm and society expects you to operate under the prewritten boundaries of what your title entails.

Now, I may be speaking from a slightly more anxious state being that I’m a senior, and the “what are you going to do after graduation?” question keeps being asked of me. Nevertheless, I do believe there is an underlying fear that comes with embarking on a new journey, especially one that involves your livelihood.

The first type of fear is finding an internship or job. I had worries about whether working with a literary agency was the right fit for me. I was intrigued by the job’s responsibilities but was unsure if my previous, and relatively limited, work with manuscripts was enough of a foundation to perform well in the role. This fear soon subsided as I began the job; I was thrown into the deep end. I was assigned multiple, different genre scripts a week where I was expected to read and write script coverages for each. I also was expected to do subject-based research for our clientele and create proposals and presentations to display my findings. While these responsibilities seem overwhelming, they motivated me to learn quickly and from my mistakes to make my next assignment that much better.

This brings me to the second type of fear, one that is performance-based. Before starting my internship, Imposter Syndrome made me doubt my confidence. I couldn’t help but question: Is my best good enough? Will I be able to produce the type of work they expect? Why should I have a say over what scripts have potential, I’m nobody… Needless to say, self-doubt is always a natural enemy. Yet, these doubts only define you if you let them. Rather than letting the fear take over, let it motivate you and prove it wrong. You will undoubtedly rise to the occasion and surprise yourself with how much you can accomplish.

The third fear is the expectations associated with the completion of an internship. The main expectation is knowing if this role is what you want to pursue as a career. If you haven’t heard it before, let me be the first to say, it is okay not to know. While I really enjoyed all that I have learned, the people I have worked with, and the role itself, I’m not sure if I would want to pursue a career as a literary agent. But I have gained a lot more knowledge about myself after this internship. I learned that I have a deep passion for helping those find their voices and ensuring their stories get told. I learned that I thoroughly enjoy the entertainment industry and would love to better understand different career paths in the field. I learned that work is not work if you love what you’re doing. In the end, it’s okay not to have all the answers. It’s learning more about the person you are that makes an internship impactful.

This is all to say, it’s normal to be afraid. In fact, most people are afraid to start something new, so don’t feel like you’re alone. This summer has taught me that the best satisfaction comes in overcoming the doubt that tries to hold you back from an experience that has the potential to change your outlook on your future.

My advice would be to chase the opportunities that make your heart skip a beat, find the excitement in the uncertainty, and allow the wind to blow fear into your sails, it will help you go far.

As my internship at the Griffin Museum of Photography comes to an end, I am more certain about my future professional prospects and the steps I need to take to work in the museum field.  Throughout the course of the summer, I have learned the importance of organizational skills to succeed in the field of arts administration. Art programming is a fast-paced environment in which the future is planned months in advance. This entails all sorts of communications with artists, organizations, guest curators, gallerists, and all sorts of creative professionals that keep the museum engine running.  This introduction to a fast-paced environment helped me organize and systematize my own work, as well as being more strategic with my own creative production. I learned to systematize my workflow, files, and graphic assets we work with for the sake of time and efficiency.

One thing I have learned about myself is that I am much more of a self-starter than I had previously imagined. For most of the creative multimedia projects I worked on at the museum, I had almost complete independence in choosing what things were going to look like, as well as a say on the technical aspects of video and audio editing, graphic design, and social media strategies. I am glad this internship program allowed me to use my creative vision to contribute to make the art world more accessible one step at a time.

At the Griffin Museum, I have been promoted as a Lead Content Creator for Social Media. Starting this August, I will be leading a team of creative interns to elevate the photographic arts and promote the mission of Arthur Griffin and the Griffin Museum of Photography. In the near future, I expect I can continue utilizing my multimedia skills to promote the museum’s many exhibitions, events, and educational programs. One of my biggest passions is to make art accessible. I hope that in the future the support offered by the Steven M. Bunson ’82 Internship Fund for the Arts and the Griffin Museum will allow me to do this on a bigger scale.

In less than two weeks, I will be starting my curatorial internship at the Rose Art Museum of modern and contemporary art. Having the opportunity to employ my creative skills and work in a museum with a permanent collection of 8,000 objects of art is really exciting. Something that I am much better prepared for thanks to the support of the World of Work program.

One opportunity.

One opportunity is all it takes to help you find your path.

What do you want to be? This question has always haunted me. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer, rather there were too many options. Park ranger, movie star, deep-sea diver, the possibilities were truly endless. However, it was when I took Professor Doherty’s Hollywood and American Culture course that I realized I wanted to pursue a career in entertainment, particularly film.

So, I was faced with a new challenge. Although settled on a path, I didn’t have a means of travel. I couldn’t begin my journey because nobody would give me the green light. It was frustrating not having a connection that could escort me down a smooth road.

I guess I wouldn’t have appreciated the opportunity as much as I do now if that was the case.

Only after sending around countless cover letters did I decide to cold call my future boss. To my surprise, he picked up on the first ring. After a fast-paced chat, he sent me a sample script. “The job is yours if you impress me with this script coverage.”

I received my first script coverage assignment soon after.

If there is an internship you want or a job that looks fascinating, don’t be afraid to chase it. Sending that email or making that phone call may seem daunting, but that extra step of showing your interest could be all the difference in making you standout as a candidate.

Now in my internship, the best word I could choose to describe my experience is dynamic, never boring. While my primary task is to write script coverages, I also conduct industry-based research and help with the agency’s communications. The virtuality of the role makes it all the more important to connect with my fellow interns and the rest of the team. I am planning a company-wide virtual hang-out. My initiative aims to humanize remote working. When individuals are given the space to learn more about one another, the harsh boundaries of remoteness seem to fade away.

Yet, my initiative wouldn’t come to life if not for my boss. He is a very personable, supportive boss who wants the best for his interns. I have written script coverages for a variety of different literature: movie scripts, self-help books, whimsical fantasy novels, scary sci-fi manuscripts, memoirs, and so many others. No matter the coverage, he is intent on hearing my thoughts on the read and whether he should invest in the author. Perhaps my understanding of summer internships is flawed, but I never thought a mere college intern’s thoughts mattered. I was shocked for my opinion to not only be heard but valued. I feel like I am actively contributing to the company.

However, this contribution goes beyond the company. The pieces I read are from real people who have amazing stories that deserve to be told. This role has allowed me to support creatives who have found their voice. The next manuscript I read could be the movie that changes your life, the book that encourages you to take the next step, or a clip that inspires you to make a change. These works have the power to impact your life and I am humbled to play a small part in making sure they get to you.

My summer internship at the Griffin Museum of Photography has undoubtedly been an amazing learning experience. While I had previous knowledge and professional experience on a variety of design and multimedia endeavors before my internship, having my work featured through a reputable arts organization has had many repercussions on how I see and relate to my own work. Firstly, I definitely put more pressure on myself to improve and learn new skills to deliver multimedia content of professional quality. I often say to myself that even though I create content behind the scenes, my work is ultimately meant to be seen and judged by others. This definitely entails some sort of reaction, feedback, and criticism, as well as the need to meet the expectations of the people I work with at the museum, our audience’s, and my own. This has pushed me to understand that different content needs different approaches, both aesthetically and marketing-wise. I have developed a deeper understanding of user-engagement insights, something that has led me to find ways to maximize user interaction through my creative work. Through my internship, I have learned strategies and new skills that have helped me deliver content that gets the point across yet is dynamic and fun to watch.   

Secondly, I have come upon the challenge of finding that sweet spot between cultivating my own voice as a multimedia creator while working to elevate the work of the artists and art organizations. I like to think of myself as a multimedia mediator with one mission in mind: Employing my creative skills to bridge the gap between cultural enterprises, their work, and the general public. I have learned that by taking advantage of digital media, organizations can expand their influence and communicate with their audiences more dynamically and authentically. At my internship, I have learned the dynamics of working in a fast-paced creative environment in which deadlines are tight and content is produced on a daily basis. As for the future, I want to keep learning more motion graphics so I can take my design practice to the next level. Learning in-depth 3D graphics would be an amazing challenge. All the skills I have learned and improved at my internship are just additions to my creative toolkit that I can employ for different projects, whether in my life as an arts student or as a creative professional.

Probably, the most important thing I have learned during this internship is that when you pursue something you are truly passionate about, you will go that extra mile it takes to get people to notice you and put in the extra effort it takes to get where you want to be. I have learned that working in the creative industry is competitive and hard, yet I do not believe that people should conform or be scared to pursue a creative career just because of the constant discouraging message around the arts. I believe the opposite. Society should encourage creativity and the arts so we can change our perception around what it means to be a creative professional. 

At my internship, I have had the opportunity to network and learn that a creative career can have many forms. There is not one set-in-stone way to be an artist or a creative professional. The photographers and artists I have met during my time at the Griffin have all sorts of businesses, galleries, and personal endeavors that they cultivate with passion and hard work. Probably, my biggest learning experience throughout this process has been to realize that as a creative person, you are the only one in charge of creating the life you want for yourself.

I most definitely feel that I achieved my defined learning goals this summer. My academic goal was to “gain hands-on experience in journalism and thus apply my studies as a journalism and American studies student to real life.” In fact, I feel that I achieved this goal far more than I expected to. I did not anticipate how much I would get to write about and explore American history and I believe that in actually applying the past to current events and situations, I gained really valuable insight and perspective on many of the issues I’ve studied the last two years. 

My career goal for the internship was “to gain professional experience working in a national magazine setting and to come out of the internship having published more of my own writing.” I’ve published 11 articles, and have been really lucky to be able to stay on in the fall as a contributor for Ms.— so that number will continue to grow! While I didn’t get to experience an in-office work environment, I do still feel that I learned about general policies and practices within the field (such as how to pitch a story, how to edit, how to learn particular style guidelines, etc.).

Finally, my personal goal for the internship was “to improve my own journalistic and nonfiction writing and gain experience writing with an activist lens.” Thanks to my wonderful supervisor, I feel that my writing skills have greatly improved since the beginning, which I am really proud of. I also got the chance to work as a feminist, and in the process, learned a lot about journalistic ethics and professional writing in general.

Surprisingly (to me at least), I don’t feel that my learning goals have changed. I think I went into this experience with really clear insight and I worked hard to reach those aims. Thanks to the generally well-thought internship, and my supervisor’s support, I feel that I really did accomplish what I set out to do.

Undoubtedly this internship has helped me clarify my career goals and interests. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in journalism before going in but coming out, I feel even more confident and is now considering branching out into more news reporting. All of my journalism experiences so far have been with magazines, mostly digital magazines. I have really loved the pace and style required for this kind of journalism as well as the wide range of genres I can write in. That being said, my few forays into more “newsy” reporting (such as this article) have piqued my interest. I definitely would like to explore this field further.

I would highly recommend spending the summer as an editorial intern with Ms. Magazine. Most importantly, my supervisor was endlessly supportive, thoughtful and helpful to me and the other interns. She took time to get to know each of us (even in a remote setting!) and once she did, made an effort to give us assignments she knew we would care about and learn from.

In terms of more general advice about interning in journalism, I would say take initiative. If you have an idea for an article, don’t hold it in. Pitching ideas to my boss this summer was an excellent experience and practice for the future (more advice— learn how to pitch really well!). It was also really exciting because I was always so invested and eager to write pieces that were entirely my idea from the start.  

The article I am most proud of is this article. 

I got to do two longer interviews for the piece and learned a lot about synthesizing research and interviews into a cohesive and flowing strong story. In general, I am just really proud of the ways I pushed myself out of my comfort zone these past few months. My very first piece was one that I pitched, which was exciting in itself, and I made an active effort throughout the internship to try different things and learn as much as possible. I feel so lucky to have had this opportunity, in part because I was able to grow in this way and challenge myself while loving every minute of it.

Hello world!

To be honest, working virtually is difficult.  When working at an in-person internship I received more help as my advisors were only an office away. In addition, I had more pressure to stay motivated as everyone else was focused on their work around me. Finally, there was a clear separation between work and home, and as a result, there were fewer distractions like my bed or my family.

However, I feel that one of the values of this virtual internship is preparing me to work from home in the future. This internship highlights the fact that working from home requires more effort: one creates one’s own schedule, there isn’t the same social aspect to one’s job, and there are more distractions. This knowledge is extremely beneficial as more and more professions, especially after COVID, will be based at home and freelancing will become more common.

The World of Work has differed from my university life in many ways. First of all the idea of deadlines is completely different. In university, deadlines appear almost arbitrary. Assignment deadlines appear to be placed randomly, many times inconveniently, throughout the semester. At the BarnArts internship, deadlines are focused around events. Most of the promotion work I have been doing has three or four projects due around the time of an event. 

Secondly, Brandeis is centered around acquiring knowledge while WOW is about utilizing your knowledge. At Brandeis, we spend hours in lectures absorbing new knowledge and learning skills on how to research and acquire new knowledge. At BarnArts, I spend most of the time utilizing my knowledge and skills I have gained in life in order to complete the tasks assigned to me.  

Thirdly, the social dynamics are completely different. At university, there is a clear hierarchy between the professor and the student, and with that comes an immense amount of respect. Given the distance between students and professors naturally, closer bonds are formed between students on campus. At my internship, there is less of a strong hierarchy between me and my supervisor. Part of the reason for this is that there is less of an age difference between my supervisor and me, only nine years difference. In addition, there is a more laid back atmosphere at the organization compared to the university setting. This is contributed to its small size as there are only three employees and the fact that it is located in Vermont. 

I have learned many important digital tools during this internship. I have become a pro at iMovie. While this is basic movie editing programming, I hope that it will provide a basis for other more advanced movie editing platforms in the future when I have more money and space on my computer. I also have become very adept at social media platforms and the basics of marketing. In addition, I have become more courageous and outspoken in the working sphere. I am more willing to email my boss first and ask for work instead of just having her assign me tasks. Finally, I am getting more comfortable with reaching out to our performer base. One of my jobs is to communicate with musicians who are performing at our events.  I was intimidated at first to do this but over time it has become easier. 

While virtual internship brings with it a new learning curve it has strengthened my digital skills immensely and prepared me to work from home in the future if need be.

I think one of the most challenging things about working remotely is building relationships with the people I am working with. In a normal workplace environment, and particularly in a college internship, in which building relationships is so important— I think a lot of time is spent on connecting with supervisors and getting advice, networking, etc. At the beginning of this internship, I really struggled with how to connect with both my supervisor and my fellow interns, all of whom seemed, just from the early introductions, really smart, talented and generally very cool people that I knew I wanted to get to know. It was definitely a struggle to try and get to know them all through Slack messages and emails and I spent a lot of time worrying about whether or not I was making a good impression or demonstrating my abilities to the fullest extent.

Now we are all a bit more settled into the internship and I feel that I actually have been able to connect with many of my colleagues, even in this “virtual state.” As a writer, or someone that intends to pursue writing moving forward in my career, I’ve always sort of envisioned that career path as a very independent and “solo” one. This internship has really taught me that writing, especially in this “virtual existence,” it’s important to form relationships and work closely with people. I’ve been able to learn about my own research and writing process by working with other interns, my editor who has already taught me so much about writing and journalism and my work has gotten into the Ms. weekly or daily emails (bottom row):

The world of work has differed from academic life in a lot of ways. One, I feel that my writing is valued in a very different way. When I file a piece with my editor, I am not getting graded or even evaluated in the same way as I would when I submit a paper to a teacher. I feel like I am really able to express my own ideas and push myself to write in the most engaging and informative way possible. When writing essays for class, I usually shape my writing and ideas to fit the prompt, class discussion and the teacher’s writing preferences. In this professional format, I have a lot more freedom (though still structured guidance). However, I do think that experiencing the world of work not in person limits my impressions of what a real job in an editorial or journalistic field would look or feel like. Most of my day still “belongs” to me, so I have a lot more flexibility and space than I would if I was in an office. While I’m undoubtedly enjoying the work immensely, I do wonder how the experience would be different or more immersive in person. 

One skill I’m building is interviewing with professional journalistic conduct. I was lucky enough to be able to write a long-form feature piece on underrepresented playwrights during COVID-19, and for the piece, I got to conduct two interviews with really incredible people. The piece came out on the 15th and it was one of the most interesting and fun pieces I have written, in large part because of how much I got to engage with the interviewees. I’m also able to work with writers who are more established and experienced than I, and I’m able to learn a lot about professional conduct from them. I think being able to interact with and engage with people you do not know in a professional manner is a really valuable skill. Not only for my future career, which will hopefully involve a lot of interviews, but also in terms of forming relationships with teachers, future employers and anyone I would meet in a professional environment. It’s interesting how making a phone call to someone you do not know, for me at least, can be really intimidating. Learning how to make those calls and send emails in ways that are polite, professional, but also most likely to get a positive response, is really important for a career in journalism.

This summer I am working for the organization BarnArts Center for the Arts. BarnArts is a nonprofit arts organization located in Barnard, Vermont. Its mission is to bring the arts to rural Vermont. Under normal circumstances, its programming includes a summer Thursday Night Music Series, indoor and outdoor plays, a Summer Youth Theater Camp, and a 5k race-fundraiser around Barnard lake.

The Thursday Night Music Series takes place at a local farm. It features musicians from Vermont as well as out of state, hosting a number of different types of genres including world music. This year the music series has been able to operate at low capacity, featuring only instate bands.
The Summer Youth Theater Camp and race-fundraiser have also been able to function in modified ways. This year the race-fundraiser, Race Around the Lake, occurred at a social distance. Every racer ran by themselves within a week’s time frame, recording their own finishes.

As their intern working remotely my main role has been to promote events, as well as, communicate the changes to the structure of the programming during the summer. In my first week, I created an Instagram account for the organization. I also helped make a survey for BranArts patrons, inquiring about their thoughts on attending programming during the COVID-19 outbreak and what precautions they wanted to see in place. BarnArts added the survey to the first Instagram post and website. My other posts on Instagram have been about upcoming events including the Summer Youth Theater Camp and Race Around the Lake. Because Race Around the Lake was socially distant, Instagram promoted the event. I even created a photo contest centered around the race. The results of the contest will be up next week!!
Aside from being the guru of social media, I have also been responsible for promoting the organization in other ways. One of my main responsibilities has been editing and creating promotional videos for various art grants. This requires splicing together footage from previous music performances. Next week, we are releasing one video, I created, on the BarnArts Instagram which features musicians from last year’s Thursday Night Music series in order to promote this year’s series. Stay tuned! The main impact my digital media work will have is to build the organization’s outreach.
The third project I am working on presently is planning a Social Justice Event. After the events in April BarnArts has wanted to get more involved in the BLM movement and promote musicians of color. As an intern, my responsibilities have included finding and contacting musicians, poets, and speakers for the event. My supervisor is also working separately on a lullaby project with the organization GlobaLocal. This project goal is to bring together immigrant Vermont musicians with nonimmigrant Vermont musicians to create multilingual lullabies. I am responsible for helping find and contact performers who would be interested in the project. My main impact of the two projects will be to create more opportunities for diverse artists in Vermont to share their art.

My academic goal for the summer is I want to familiarize myself more with the Vermont music scene, who the famous artists are, and who is up and coming. By organizing and running the 18-week community series I will get exposure to many different groups. As a result, by the end of the summer, I will have a greater understanding of the Vermont music scene.

My career goal is I want to improve upon my fundraising and grant writing skills. One of my jobs as an intern will be fundraising as well as researching and writing grants. As a result of the feedback, I will receive from Chloe on my grant and fundraising work, my fundraising and grant writing skills will improve over the course of the summer. My personal goal is I want to connect and form friendships with multiple types of people. During their summer music series, BarnArts hosts up to 600 people. They also have various employees that run their farm stand and organic kitchen. While it is unknown if we will be able to meet in large groups during the summer, I hope these concerts will give me the chance to meet people and form friendships especially with those that work at the farm. Some of these goals will need to be modified as the internship is now virtual because of COVID-19.

I have learned a lot so far about the art world in rural Vermont and look forward to continuing my work with BarnArts over the summer!

I had a wonderful time at the Jewish Museum this summer. I learned so much about how the Museum runs and really felt like I was a part of the community there. As a public programs intern, I frequently interacted with the museum’s visitors. Before the internship began, I was nervous that I would find this aspect of the internship intimidating. However, communicating with the public during different programs I assisted with became one of my favorite parts of my internship. I loved feeling like a voice for the Museum and getting direct feedback on events hosted at the Museum.

One of the events I worked at was a day-long adult art class. This course focused on the self-portraits musician Leonard Cohen made throughout his lifetime, highlighted in the main summer exhibition at the Museum, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything. In the class, we asked participants to create their own self portraits in a similar marriage of language and visuals to what Cohen used. One of my proudest moments during my internship was helping during this studio program. I had a lot of fun flexing my studio art background in my otherwise art history-focused internship. Additionally, it was really exciting to see the participants create such wonderful self portraits. I had no idea about the adult studio programming at the Museum before my internship, and I found it to be a really special aspect of the Museum’s community. At the end of the class, we hung up the portraits made by the participants in the hall and had a small critique. It’s a really special moment to see a piece displayed at a Museum then walk upstairs, in the same building, and see work made that day in response to the piece.

Working with the Museum’s public programming staff this summer has opened my eyes to all of the career opportunities available in the museum world. In school, it can seem that the only way to be involved in the museum world is by being a curator and having a strictly art historical background. However, many of the people I met in the education department have studio art backgrounds. There are so many ways to help people engage with art and it was a great opportunity to see that firsthand this summer. Even as an art history major, I find that going into museums can be intimidating sometimes. Working in the education department opened my eyes to the different ways we can connect to art and have a meaningful experience. I know I will take this knowledge with me in my future internships and, hopefully one day, a career in a museum.

I encourage anyone interested in an internship at the Jewish Museum, or any museum, to get out there and look at art! Go to museums and sit in front of work, draw work, attend events at museums you are close to — there are truly so many ways to interact with art and be involved in an art community. If you find it stressful to walk around an exhibition at a large museum, that is okay! There are a multitude of ways to engage with art every day, everywhere. Even something as small as photographing a mural on a wall in a city is a way with the art community around you and think about art in a new way. The art world is a big place with many different opportunities to be involved. Be open-minded and apply for different kinds of positions within museums and outside of museums, you never know what you might discover.

I finished my internship this week! I can’t believe it is over already. At the same time, it feels like I’ve been working there forever. I learned so much and was introduced to so many new things and people. I even got to lay my eyes on Ariana Grande–in the flesh! That was definitely a highlight of the summer.  

Working this internship allowed me to finally see what the film and photography industry is like, and I’m happy to say I still want to be a part of it. I wish there had been more photoshoots to assist on because I find myself missing the creative side of the art, but I still really enjoyed the feeling of importance as part of the production team. Being responsible for getting everything necessary to the set is a huge weight but super rewarding when done well. 

I set out wanting to gain a clear understanding of the step-by-step process of set production. I also wanted to establish and build some professional relationships with my coworkers, supervisors, and anyone else I met along the way. I wanted to gain more confidence in myself and in the work I was doing. Throughout the weeks, the assignments and projects I was tasked with allowed me to tweak my skills and made me a better intern with each day that passed. I liked the intense and faced-paced environment. At times, I thought I was swamped in work. Each time I finished my workload, I would soon realize I had merely been in the eye of the storm.

I am definitely proud of sticking through this internship and living as a New Yorker. I’m sure I’ve picked up some habits and will return to campus with the ability to walk a mile a minute, but it’s been a great experience. I can’t get over the fact that just days before starting this position, I was in a completely different country! I definitely miss home sometimes, but it feels great to be making solid steps toward my career. 

Trying to land an internship in the film industry? Do what I did and submit a million applications. Tighten your resume. Build your portfolio. Apply early! Don’t listen to the people telling you that getting a job is next to impossible. Have you seen the end credits of a movie? There are plenty of jobs, you just have to be first and among the best of the applicants. It’s super cool that Annie’s team thought I was worthy enough to be in her presence. After leaving the office, I now have the skills to prove it. 

Huuuuge thank you to Annie Leibovitz and her staff! An even bigger thank you to the Steven M. Bunson ’82 Internship Fund and the WOW team for helping me experience this amazing summer!

Like every dazzling production, mine has finally come to its close. In a few weeks, the curtains will be drawn, the lights dimmed, and I will be onto my next premiere. Yet, all the knowledge that this tale has taught me will live on in every show I do. 

If I could extend my run with Speakeasy Stage Company as their Production Management Intern, I most certainly would. They have exceeded my expectations in their support of my theatrical education. Not only have I learned everything, and more, I wanted to in technical theatre, but my eyes have been opened to the office setting of a theatre and all that is required as an administrator. I am grateful for all the theatre professionals I have met and the doors they have opened for me in my career path. This internship has solidified my already established belief that I am meant to be a theatre artist and have the growing abilities to succeed as such. 

While I am saddened to leave Speakeasy and return to Brandeis, I am comforted by the awareness that my work as an intern will continue to influence the company after I am gone. When I could, I wrote guides for future interns so they would more easily understand tasks they were given. I created timelines, spreadsheets, and checklists galore for this coming season’s shows. Every week, I read and analyzed two plays which were then voted on as possible future productions. (And let me tell you, there are some fantastic new works coming!) An intern’s work has value, even if on the surface they seem to be the lowest on the totem pole. Speakeasy’s staff is well aware of their interns’ work. One staff meeting, they surprised us with cupcakes- complete with headshots of each intern. 

It was nice to be recognized by Brandeis for my hard work, too! Kristin and Jackie from Hiatt stopped by Speakeasy’s office one morning to meet my supervisors -both of whom are wonderful teachers – and speak to me about my experience. If you want to hear more about working in a professional theatre, you can check out the video interview here . 

Whatever area of theatre you are interested in, it is important to understand as many other jobs within the stage as you can. Not only does this establish an appreciation for those around you, all of whom are working together to put on a show, but it also creates more job opportunities for yourself in theatre. The world of performance is an incredibly competitive field so the more you can do within that field, the more chances of success you will be given. However, success doesn’t just come from knowing how to complete a job. Everyone appreciates a positive attitude and strong work ethic. If you and your competitor can both do the same job equally well, the company will choose the harder working, more positive applicant, especially if they already know them. Get to know as many people as possible and help them out. The show will always go on, but it is your choice whether you give yourself the best chance to be included.

I will never forget the kindness and generosity of the people I have met at Speakeasy. Everyone was always willing to explain something new to me, seemingly knowing that they were once in my shoes. I know that Speakeasy’s show will go on and am grateful to have been a part of it- even if for one sweltering hot summer.

THANK YOU SPEAKEASY! 

If you want to see upcoming Speakeasy shows, click here!