My internship at the Canadian Federation of Friends of Museums was an exciting and incredible opportunity. I am currently a third-year undergraduate student at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ majoring in art history and minoring in history and anthropology. My areas of interests cover contemporary art, curation, and the street art scene in Montreal. After graduation, I plan on pursuing a master’s degree in Museum Studies.
Considering my interest in museums, I was motivated to find an internship that would allow me to network with people from the field and discover career possibilities. I had not previously done an internship in my area of interest, which is why I was eager to initiate myself into my first professional experience. My objective for this internship was to learn about the ways organizations maintain a relationship with their partnering museums and heritage sites. I was interested in discovering how a non-profit contributed to our cultural milieu and supported artistic institutions. Alternatively, I wanted to take on projects independently and creatively. Therefore, it was important for me to find an internship that would encourage autonomous work, helping me develop organizational skills in the process.
The Canadian Federation of Friends of Museums is a non-profit organization that encourages and supports volunteer work in museums and heritage sites. Their mission is to educate the public about Canadian heritage and to preserve its knowledge through its day-to-day operations in fundraising and research. As it is also member of the World Federation of Friends of Museums, the CFFM is responsible for sending a delegate to their International Congresses and Annual Meetings, representing the Canadian portion of Friends of museums.
As an intern, my responsibilities were primarily to handle communications through our social media presence. This included producing a monthly bulletin, Volunteer Voices, and helping for the editing of the quarterly publication, Au Courant. To do so, I had to familiarize myself with the platform MailChimp and contacted multiple institutions to receive features from them in our editions. I also produced social media content by promoting our online and in-person events and sharing exciting news about volunteering work to our audience. Moreover, I handled day-to-day and administrative tasks such as responding to emails, organizing files, and scanning them to complete our archival database.
The highlight of my internship was to produce our monthly bulletin, Volunteer Voices. I enjoyed it immensely as it gave me the opportunity to make research about exciting events and conversations, volunteer work for our readers, calls for papers, and funding opportunities. Our team was also open to innovative ideas, such a creating new templates for our bulletin design. I also had the opportunity to create unique monthly editions; for instance, in June, for which we celebrate National Indigenous History Month, I created an issue with news and events related to Indigenous culture and heritage. I also enjoyed working with our team; board members were supportive of my work and communicated their satisfactions following the completion of my tasks. My supervisor, Richard, sent me multiple times words of encouragement which were tremendously helpful as I sometimes felt anxious or unsure about my work.
One of the challenges I encountered was organizing my day-to-day tasks. As my internship allowed me to work independently, I was at first unsure about how to accomplish the tasks given to me before a specific deadline. I thus used a time block method, which allowed me to organize each hour of my workday. Moreover, I found it difficult to productively work on archival organization when I did not receive training about it. Me and my colleague Joia thus decided to update the training manual to include directions about office procedures related to archives.
I did not receive academic credit for the internship.
The impact that this internship had in my university experience is that it allowed me to observe what I like and dislike about my field of study. I realized working at the CFFM that I did not enjoy working with archives and filing documents. However, it strengthened my appreciation for connections in the museum and heritage field and made me want to explore opportunities related to design and communications. I also discovered volunteering opportunities helpful for my professional path.
The funding I received from the Arts Internship Office allowed me to be part-time at my current job so I can have time to work on my internship. It thus helped me cover my living costs for the summer related to housing, food, and transport.
