Jeanne,

I did a paid internship at the Jersey City Museum in Spring 1994.  The
Museum had received a Dodge Grant designated to pay interns for working
in the education and collections/conservation dept.  I was paid minimum wage,
which was at that time $5.05 an hour.

I am currently doing an unpaid internship as part of my course of study
in Museum Education at The George Washington University.  My
transportation costs are immense and the site reimburses me for 1/3 of my
cost at the end of each month.  I also work part time.  I exist off of my
student loans, since GWU does not have anything remotely resembling
graduate housing.  Many people are surprised that I would have to take
out loans at all since I am an African-American woman.   However, I chose
Museum Education because I genuinely like it, not because I thought I
would get rich.   And that is my 2 cents on that topic.


Patsy Green
GWU-MEP '96

On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Jeanne Finan wrote:

> I read numerous listings for unpaid internships on this list and I know that
> museums are not exactly rolling in the dough to be able to pay all the staff
> they need. And sure, I know that internships are great learning
> opportunities, etc. etc. HOWEVER, I also know from my own professional
> experience and also now as the parent of a college student who cannot afford
> to do an unpaid internship, that if we are serious about diversifying our
> staffs (and interns are certainly our future staffs) that we need to figure
> out some way to pay interns. Just as you and I cannot afford to work for
> free, most college students cannot afford that either. Most of them need to
> work at paying jobs in the summer to help pay for their college expenses.
> They are suffering many of the same cutbacks in financial aid that our own
> institutions suffer from. So by offering non-compensated internships we are
> opening our museums only to students who have families wealthy enough to
> support their kids doing this and to foot all the bills for college without
> any expectations from the student themselves. Hey! I wish everyone were that
> fortunate but that is definitely not the reality out there. And it is also
> giving us a very narrow, elite pool of interns which is just the opposite of
> what we say we are trying to do in our museums.
> But how to get funding for PAID internships?
> I'd like to here from some museums (or students who have done paid or unpaid
> internships) on how they creatively solved this problem.
>
> Jeanne Finan
>