Name: Hannah Gordon
Class Year: 2025
Major: History & Psychology
Hometown: Cary, NC
Internship Organization: North Carolina Museum of History
Job Title: Adult Programs Intern
Location: Raleigh, NC
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
I have been mainly working with the adult programs coordinator and helping host the programs the museum holds. I have done several virtual ones where I help monitor the chat and answer questions. At the end of the program, I ask the speaker questions from the audience (so that we don't have to worry about a lot of people unmuting to speak). I also help edit captions for these programs for when they are posted on Youtube. I have also been doing some work for the intern and volunteer coordinator. The museum has several carts pertaining to different subjects that docents run in the exhibits to allow museum visitors to interact with (fake) artifacts. I am helping do some research for the World War II cart, so I have been reading through books and finding articles online and then summarizing them in paragraphs.
Why did you apply for this internship?
From my understanding, there are typically two ways people with history degrees go. One of those is academia, which typically involves being a professor at a university and researching/publishing. The other option is public history, which would be museums/other historical sites. I applied for this internship so I could get a feel for what kind of career I could have working in a museum and using my history degree that way. So far, I think I have found success in that goal, and I am definitely able to use this information as I decide what I want to do after college!
What has been your favorite part of this internship?
My favorite thing about this internship is being able to experience history with people who are also interested in it and share it with others. In my responsibilities in helping with programs, I have gotten to see some amazing speakers and learn about some really cool things! One speaker talked about the effects of hurricanes in North Carolina starting in the colonial period and moving into the future. I also went with one of my supervisors to Somerset Place in Creswell, NC for a summer festival. There I got to interact with all kinds of people—from kids who wanted to answer trivia questions about North Carolina history, to Vietnam War veterans who had stories of their own to tell. Even in my work where I am not directly interacting with people, such as my World War II research, I love knowing that one day that will be used to reach tons of visitors at the museum. I am really excited to continue meeting interesting people and share history with them!
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
One of the major skills I am learning through this internship is how to work with minimal direction in an autonomous fashion. I am a perfectionist who often attempts to do every assignment as perfectly as possible. However, this often requires a specific set of instructions and requirements, similar to what I would receive in assignments at college. However, a lot of the things I am doing at the museum do not come with that kind of direction, which leaves me to make decisions about the best way to do it. For instance, in my caption editing responsibilities, they explained to me how to use the software, and that was it. I quickly became overwhelmed as I realized that when people were speaking it was hard to apply the same grammar rules that I would in writing. Should I take out words like "um" or "uh"? Should I delete repeated words? Where should I end the sentence? I didn't know what they had done in the past nor did I know what was expected of me. However, as I went through it, it became clear that going with what looked and sounded right was really the best option. While this was one of the first of many situations like this I have experienced at the museum, I have handled them better and better each time, learning to trust in myself and my decision-making! I think this skill is important to me because no matter what career I end up in, this is something that will apply to all of them. Especially with my perfectionist tendencies, having less direction is something that is stressful for me; this internship is giving me the opportunity to build on this skill before I enter the professional world on my own.
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