Eye-Opening: Interning at the Smithsonian #5

Every new position is an eye-opening experience for the person in it. This is no different with interning at the Smithsonian. While the typical tasks I do for my internship are not different from tasks I do for other responsibilities in my life (attending meetings, transcribing documents, reading materials, writing content, creating digital history projects), the exact organization of everything is what is new.

When I started the internship, I did not quite know what to expect. I had worked a handful of different public history jobs at Norfolk Tour Company, Cape Henry Lighthouse, as a remote contractor researching for educational civics programming with Woodlawn Pope Leighey House (WPL), to more recent work at the Roy Rosenzweig Center transcribing old plague bills and researching them to write blog posts. Yet with all of these experiences, the Smithsonian was still different.

I imagined my coworkers and our correspondence would be a lot more formal, similar to how I interacted with my supervisor at WPL, but the atmosphere is a lot more relaxed and congenial despite being remote. While we still primarily connect through email, most of the emails are informal, like if we had a group chat on a program like Slack or Teams. Of course, I think that this is one of the positives of my specific team (SLA Education), which may not be the same between multiple departments.

I also did not expect as many Smithsonian events as there are. I believe I had previously mentioned going to one in-person day to help run an event at the Hirschhorn museum, and going to the virtual Smithsonian Education Summit, but since getting my official Smithsonian email about a month ago, I’ve been showered with invitations to countless events and even some specifically aimed at interns for networking, which makes me feel guilty, since it’s so difficult to attend most of them because of my loaded graduate student schedule.

While I’m somewhat disappointed with how slow the administrative aspects of the Smithsonian are, it’s hard to be anything less than pleased with almost every other aspect. My biggest comment is probably that the internship was more enjoyable after I had finished my summer class and before fall started, because it felt a lot simpler to have a lot fewer responsibilities, which allowed me to stay in the headspace to get more work done more efficiently. Now that the fall semester has started back up and I’ve got two classes and two part-time jobs in addition to the internship, I feel like it’s sometimes a struggle to put the right “hat” on when I sit down to work, but I’m sure that I’ll find a way to manage because it’s already getting a bit easier a few weeks into the semester.