Week 8.5:
Final Week!

July 28, 2021

Last Few Days of Working

My final week was spent like most of the rest. My one day in person, I worked on helping to organize another filing cabinet of our collection items. The rest was spent cataloging a small collection of items from a fraternal organization. My favorite part of cataloging these items that were donated to the museum is taking photos. It is an important part of the cataloging process so that we know exactly the item’s state at the time we receive it. And so, in the future, archivists can see if and how it has deteriorated. It ended up being a short day but was a good one to finish up this internship. During my days working from home, I finished filming and editing the final Summer History Adventure video on jazz music. 

Final Reflections

This has definitely been a beneficial experience for me. It goes without saying that I have learned a lot, definitely more than I thought I’d ever know about the state of Iowa. The large majority of the work I did was research. Primarily, that was research for the museum’s upcoming exhibit on the school-to-prison pipeline. This term was coined to describe the trend of overpopulating prisons due to the lack of rehabilitation in juvenile facilities and the over-policing of schools. Of course, this is a topic with a lot of different causes and factors. My research was pretty broad, so I looked at everything from the over-policing of schools all the way to the use of penal labor and how it relates to the 13th amendment. A lot of what I learned on this topic was quite alarming to me and honestly pretty difficult to process just how bad this system is. I also had a few other research topics, such as Jesse Owens, Juneteenth, the Clark Family, and Jazz music.

Learning About Myself

I undoubtedly learned a lot from this experience. But perhaps the most important thing I learned was that this is probably not the field I want to go into for the rest of my career. I struggled quite a bit with just doing independent research. And during the time in which I was in the museum, I spent most of the time by myself in front of a computer. It is, in all honesty, a lot of tedious work with fairly little interaction with other people. If anything, I learned that I really enjoy working alongside other people, and that is something I am going to look for in a job. Regardless of whether this will be in the future for me, I am very glad I learned so much about the behind-the-scenes of museums and all the little things that go into it.

 Great Summer Finished Up

If I were to do anything differently, I wish I had gone out of my way to do more things with the education department, such as museum tours, as this is what I was more interested in. I spent most of my time doing curatorial, which was, of course, interesting, but I wish I had thought of working with the education department a bit more. Needless to say, this has been a great summer, even if a bit stressful at times.