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From: Ann Trowbridge
To: owner-museum-l
Subject: RE: internships, diversity & reality
Date: Monday, April 08, 1996 10:16AM

We are an architectral design firm that gets many requests from students and
recent grads to do unpaid internships and short summer internships.   We
don't do this and instead employ a limited number of interns for a minimum
stay of about a year.  We pay them hourly for every hour worked and expect
them to be an integral part of the firm's workforce and to perform a variety
of tasks, from computer drafting and model building to helping with general
errand running.  Their time is budgeted into our proposals to clients.
  When there is an opportunity for a more strictly educational experience--
training in computer skills, trips to meetings and jobsites, etc.,-- we try
to include them.  We also employ interns to help maintain our photoarchives
and drawing archives.  We have found that limiting our internships improves
the quality of the experience for those we do employ, contributes to
diversifying our permanent staff as a number of interns are hired after
graduation, and allows for the best use of the rest of the staff's time and
mentoring skills.

Ann Trowbridge
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From: owner-museum-l
To: Multiple recipients of list MUSEUM-L
Subject: internships, diversity & reality
Date: Friday, April 05, 1996 10:43AM

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