Who We Are and Why We are Writing

We are unabashed lovers of museums and seek to better understand our place in them. 

As part of a  Certificate in Art Museum Education at the University of North Texas, we are all required to participate in an internship at an art institution, which is the best way to figure out how and where we belong in such an institution.  An element of this internship is that we document our experiences in some way and, as a group (we are seven strong in number), we have decided to keep a blog. 

We will each write an initial post and a final post of the same theme; the first before we begin our internships and the last after we've completed them.  The first post that we each write will be about what we hope to get out of our internship experiences this summer and beyond.  What hopes and dreams, expectations and wishes lay ahead of us based on what we already know about internships, about ourselves, and about museums?  What do we suspect might surprise us, challenge us, and make us better in this experience?

Our final post will be about what we have learned through these internships, what personal experiences and meanings we have attached to what we have learned, and how we plan to apply what we have learned to our lives, personally and professionally.  We will write about what we wished we had known before we started our internships and what kind of advice we will give to students who come after us.  We will discuss what transformed us, what scared us, what we were proud of ourselves for.  

The in-between posts, of which there will be two from each of us, are going to be splatters of experience, on whatever topic from our internship that inspires us at the moment of writing.  We want this blog to be a sort of support group, to help us celebrate our accomplishments as interns, to turn to for questions, to use for advice and friendship, and we will do that through commenting on one another's posts. 

We have been told this will be a life-changing experience, in many ways, and that we will learn things about ourselves that we might not understand yet.  Here we go.