Internships are first and foremost learning experiences. While organizations do benefit from the work interns do, internships are not jobs, and interns are expected to receive significant learning support. While some students may be excited to take on internships that allow them to apply already-existing expertise or skills, in general an ideal internship is one where the intern comes in precisely to learn new things or gain experience in areas they don’t have practical experience in yet.

Internships help students build upon their classroom learning, providing opportunities to practice skills and contextualize general theoretical concepts in relation to particular, real-world contexts. Importantly, an internship is not just any kind of “hands-on” experience; a Museology internship ought to relate to a particular museum practice central to the student’s professional interests. See our Courses page for a sense of the expertise students are developing through coursework, and check out MuseumsForward to get a feel for our students’ professional interests.

Here’s a good test of whether a particular project would be appropriate for a Museology intern: is the project or work under consideration something you could train a volunteer to do in a short amount of time? That’s probably a volunteer position, not an internship. Internships should present an opportunity for students to exercise their developing professional expertise.

As noted in relation to “learning experience,” interns are learners, not employees. Whereas the primary mandate of an employee’s supervisor is typically to ensure certain work is done in a satisfactory manner, an internship supervisor’s responsibility is to support the intern as a learner.

Focusing an internship experience on what the student wants to learn and supporting them through regular check-ins, meaningful feedback, and mentorship will almost always lead to a resulting deliverable everyone can be excited about. 

While Museology internships usually don’t serve as directly as “pipelines” for recruitment they way internships do in other industries, interns do become part of the general network of museum professionals in the Seattle area and beyond. Hosting Museology interns is a great way to elevate your organization’s profile in the field and develop your network (as both an individual internship supervisor and as an organization).

Internships can infuse fresh perspectives into your institution, force some clarification of priorities, and generate momentum behind stalled, “back-burner” projects. Hosting interns can help organizations flex muscles critical to sustaining a positive organizational culture: collaboration and departmental bridge-building, clarification of roles and responsibilities, adherence to strategic priorities, and the adoption of a learning orientation. For individual supervisors, internships can be deeply rewarding and professionally invigorating. 

Internships provide crucial orienting experiences for early-career museum professionals. By helping emerging professionals develop a richer understanding of the field and their own strengths and interests, museums enhance the fit between the field’s needs and the availability of a workforce prepared to address them. Your internship may be key to helping an intern avoid dead ends or identify unanticipated opportunities!

The guidance of an experienced museum professional is an indispensable part of an internship. While a student may be able to learn something from carrying out a project independently, that kind of learning experience pales in comparison to one supported by an established practitioner. An internship supervisor should be someone with substantial training and experience in the practice central to the internship, and is ideally someone active professional associations and learning communities related to the practice.

Besides supporting interns in at least some of the ways outlined below, internships supervisors are expected to ensure students are adequately onboarded, have the resources and support they need to complete their work and achieve their learning objectives, and receive regular, substantive feedback.

Supervisors are also expected to complete two forms:

• Internship Agreement Form: this form is generated by the intern, completed in collaboration with their supervisor, and signed by the intern, supervisor, and Museology Internship Coordinator. The form serves to document key details and set up a successful internship, ensuring the intern and supervisor are as much “on the same page” as they can be.
• Supervisor Evaluation Form: this form should be completed within the final 20 work hours or two weeks of the internship. While the Museology Internship Coordinator will share the completed form with the student, supervisors are encouraged to use this form as a starting point for a more in-depth conversation with the student near the end of the internship.

Although the precise ways a supervisor supports an intern’s growth will vary depending on the intern and supervisor’s particular backgrounds and on the specifics of the internship itself, supervisors typically support interns in most, if not all, of the following ways:

• Setting a “stage,” task environment, direction for the project: defining scope, parameters, activities, deliverable(s), clarifying what aspects of the work are most important and what are “nice-to-haves” or optional as far as time, capacity, and interest allow.
• Helping interns define learning outcomes, identify areas for growth (both at the outset and throughout the internship and at the conclusion)
• Holding interns accountable to learning outcomes and project activities/deliverables. Work with interns to set up checkpoints throughout the internship with specific goals for each checkpoint. (Ideally, this will happen during every shift interns complete, or at least once every 8 hours of work.)
• Providing direct training: while some internships may involve more direct training than others, any internship should include at least some direct instruction related to the work interns are doing. It’s not an internship if an intern is expected to show up already knowing exactly how to carry out the work.
• Modeling: this can be in relation to the practice itself (showing how the work is done), professional behavior in general, or to all the collaboration and diplomacy that is in a sense external to the practice but critical to its flourishing.
• Providing feedback: going beyond simple uninformative encouragement or approval, feedback ought to include constructive criticism, granular tips/pointers related to practice, and the offering of questions or provocations when appropriate and validation or encouragement when on the right track, both in relation to practice-specific things and in relation to professional behavior generally.
• Supporting problem-solving and helping interns refine their perception/interpretation of situations they’ll encounter as practitioners.
• Advocating for interns’ work as needed, highlighting/uplifting their work (within your organization and beyond)
• Sharing professional development resources, both that might be helpful with the specific project they’re working on and more generally for the practice the student is interested/engaged in
• Helping interns understand your specific context. Classes will cover fundamentals and generalizable, transferable skills and practices, but your internship may provide students an opportunity to learn about the specificities of practices in particular contexts. Highlight these specificities for interns, offering comparisons to other contexts as far as you’re able.
• Connecting interns to (a) people they need to collaborate directly with in their work and (b) people who would just be good connections to make in general considering their interests and career goals
• Helping interns understand how the practice of interest is embedded within / connected to the rest of the institution and the wider institutional/societal ecosystem it’s a part of. Getting the student access to attending all staff meetings or board meetings. Sitting down and explaining the org chart, financial picture, and history of the institution.

• Museology students are required to complete 180 internship hours in total.
• Students may complete all 180 hours (or more) in one internship, or they may spread their hours over multiple separate internships.
• Students may complete internships anywhere in the world (in accordance with applicable labor laws), and internships may be conducted either on-site, remotely, or both.

Internship timeframes

Museology students may complete internships anytime during their two years in the program. While not strictly required, most Museology internships tend to be arranged in alignment with the UW Academic Calendar. Most commonly, internships tend to over summer break (June through September) (students don’t have classes over the summer) or during the winter and spring quarters. Fall quarter internships, though less common, do happen, and theoretically an internship can start and end at any time. Students tend to be most intently searching for internships during the fall (ahead of winter quarter) and spring (ahead of summer).

Some common arrangements include:

• 90 hours over 1 quarter (around 9 hours per week)
• 180 hours over 2 quarters (around 9 hours per week)
• 90-180 hours over summer break (10-40 hours per week)

Program demands on students’ time

Museology is a full-time program, meaning students are expected to devote around 40 hours per week to their studies. Key for internship scheduling purposes is the way a student’s hours devoted to their studies are spread throughout the week:

• Students tend to take anywhere from 3 or 4 courses each quarter, spending around 10 to 12 hours per week in the classroom, with the remaining 28-30 expected hours happening outside of the classroom.
• Most of our courses happen during the afternoon or morning, but a few of our classes are in the evening.
• We try to schedule classes only Monday through Thursday so that students have Fridays free every quarter. This isn’t always possible; we occasionally have a Friday course in some quarters.
• Almost all of our classes are in-person, on-campus at the UW Seattle campus. (This is important in accounting for commute times.)

• Ultimately, Museology students are responsible for arranging and documenting their internships, in addition to the responsibilities outlined in the internship agreement form. Students also complete assignments throughout their experience to facilitate their learning, which are reviewed by the Museology internship coordinator at the conclusion of the internship. (See “Resources for supervisors” below for more insight on one of these assignments.)
• Museology staff provide administrative support to help connect students and hosts, to assist students in documenting their internships, and to coordinate with host sites as needed throughout the internship. Museology staff also organize an annual internship fair to facilitate connection between students and hosts.
• Internship hosts take on the general supervisory responsibilities outlined in the “What’s expected of internship supervisors?” section above, and any more specific responsibilities agreed upon and documented in the Internship Agreement Form.

Students may apply for a job posted online, respond to a posting shared directly with students through the Museology internship coordinator, or reach out to people they’ve met through the internship fair or elsewhere.

If you’d like to advertise an internship opportunity with our students, please email a document describing the opportunity to museint@uw.edu. While you may format your document however you wish, please refer to our Internship Posting Template for details on the following pieces of information that must be included in any internship opportunity we share with our students:

• Basic information about your organization
• Overview of Internship Opportunity Context
• Internship Description
• Supervisory Support & Resources
• Compensation details
• How to apply

This is a critical part of setting the stage for successful internships; in the rare case that internships turn out differently than both parties hoped they would, it is most often due to a lack of clear expectations from the beginning, whether in terms of clarity around the nature of the work or associated deliverables or in terms of expectations for intern and supervisor conduct and communication. Students will create the form and work with their host to ensure they’re both clear and in agreement on the following:

• Learning objectives, project activities and deliverables
• Time commitment, including total number of hours and projected start and end dates
• Relationship between intern, supervisor, and learning experience: understanding how the project relates to the intern’s interests and goals, and what experience and expertise the supervisor brings
• Expectations regarding scheduling, modality, and communication

Compensation: it is critical that students and hosts are both 100% clear about compensation expectations. See below for more information.

Near the end of the internship, supervisors complete an Internship Evaluation Form (linked above) to share feedback with their intern. In addition to completing this form to verify the satisfactory completion of the internship, supervisors are encouraged to meet with interns near the conclusion of the internship to debrief the experience more informally in conversation.

Review our Intern Orientation Checklist to ensure students receive proper onboarding.

Check out the internship reflection guide our students use to process their experiences at the end of their internship. The questions included therein are all based on reflections past interns have shared about things they learned through their internships. Many of these relate to things one couldn’t necessarily set as a learning goal at the beginning, but, as the supervisor, having these things in mind throughout the internship may be helpful.

Museology holds a yearly Internship & Community Partners Fair, usually during the fall. This is a great chance to connect with students about specific internship opportunities you may have in a given year, but also to establish relationships and discuss all the other ways students may get involved with your work. Please email museint@uw.edu if you would be interested in attending this event in the future.

• Host sites may share information about potential internship opportunities with the Museology Graduate Advisor, who will gladly pass this information along to students (see our internship posting template linked above). Host sites conduct their own interview process and select a candidate.
• Once a host site identifies a candidate they’d like to move forward with, they complete the Museology Paid Internship Set-Up Form to confirm the student’s eligibility for funding and to begin coordinating the details of the cost-sharing agreement for that particular internship. Host sites are strongly encouraged, though not required, to contribute some amount of funding to the internship, even if it’s just $1 per hour.
• Every Museology student is eligible for up to 90 hours of Museology paid internship funding at a rate of $22/hr.
• For off-campus partners: organizations pay interns and submit invoices for reimbursement afterwards. Museology is unable to provide guidance as to how interns should be classified as employees.
• For on-campus partners: departments work with Museology staff to set up student assistant positions in Workday. Please allow 3 to 4 weeks for this process prior to the start date of the internship. 

• Complete the UW Museology Paid Internship Partner Site Application. Email museint@uw.edu if you have any issues accessing this form, or if you complete it and don’t hear back from us within 2 weeks. 
• Meet with our internship coordinator. Once we’ve processed your application, our internship coordinator will reach out to share more details about the reimbursement process and schedule a 30-minute meeting to review this and make sure we’re all on the same page. 
• Start hosting interns, following the same process as outlined above in “How do Museology internships work.” Pay your intern along the way, and then submit an invoice to receive reimbursement.