In thinking about internships, I believe the best place for me to start is with my own internship experience. When I was a MA student at Northeastern University, I completed two internships. The first I completed with my hometown’s historical society. The internship centered on research about Samuel Slater and his influence in the development of northeastern Connecticut. I developed a presentation which was delivered at Old Sturbridge Village. My second internship involved conducting oral history interviews of former secretaries of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. The completed project was housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Neither internship was paid, and neither internship actually gave me the experience of working at an actual public history organization. However, they were both valuable experiences and allowed me to expand my CV. Flash forward to my current life. Today, I wear two hats. Well, actually three hats. Ok, four. I am an assistant professor of public history at the University of North Alabama. I am the public history coordinator and am responsible for managing our graduate assistantships and internships. I am the director of UNA’s public history center. And, I am the interim executive director of the Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area. These four hats all require me to think about internships deeply – and in different ways.

In my first role, I am obviously interested in my students completing internships that reinforce what they learn in the classroom. And I am also interested in seeing them gain experience navigating the realm of public history. Hence, I like internships that are completed at an agency or organization under the supervision of trained staff.

In my second role, I deal with the practical realities of running a program in a relatively rural area with few places for my students to complete internships under the direction of public history professionals. While we do have a city museum system, internships with them rarely actually put the students into the museums themselves. Instead, they work on projects outside of the museum; for example, they might develop an educational resource packet or brochure. We do have a trained curator at a nearby museum and a trained archeologist at another. Both of these museums are approximately a forty minute drive (nearby is relative in Alabama) and for many of our students who work full time as well as go to school full time, getting to these sites for internships is challenging. We have had great success with our university archives hosting internships and the Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area has also hosted some of our students with positive results. We have had students venture further afield, but this has only worked for three reasons (or a combination thereof). First, the institution provided them with housing; second, the institution paid them; and third, the institution was located close to family and the student was able to stay with them. Most of our students, both at the MA and undergraduate levels face enormous challenges moving to take an internship somewhere else. Most of them have a lease, which means they will have to pay for both a place to live where the internships are located and for their rent in the Shoals (there is not a thriving sublet market in rural Alabama). Most of them cannot afford to take an unpaid position during the summer as this is the time when many of them actually earn enough money to support themselves during the academic year. All of this taken together means that our students end up with similar experiences to my own, internships that result in projects but not necessarily in actual institutional experience. Both are valuable, but the second can lead to many more opportunities than the first through the development of a professional network.

In my fourth role (back to the third in a moment), which I am about to transition to full-time at the end of the semester leaving the problems of my first two roles to my successor, I am faced with the practical economic reality which makes paid internships so rare. A few students who have interned with the MSNHA have been paid. These internships, which have been completed by both UNA students and students from other institutions, normally amount to one per summer. Other students have completed projects but have not been paid for them. While I have a relatively large budget for a small organization, I am pressed to spread my resources out in many different areas, meaning that I don’t have the resources to support a significant number of interns. This is in despite of my knowing that the students need the support and such support often leads to stronger projects as students can really focus their attention on their work if they don’t have to support themselves financially in another way simultaneously. I have enough projects to support a large number of interns, but lack the financial resources to do so. I also lack the staff to oversee a large number of projects.

In my third role, I face all of the problems outlined above. I want to see my students gain valuable experience, I have loads of projects, I have few (well, really no) resources, and I lack the staff necessary to oversee projects. The center has hosted one intern, but I feel like her experience was seriously lacking as it totally involved un-paid project work and didn’t afford her the opportunity to actually gain practical institutional experience. As director, I am obviously a trained professional, which makes hat number one happy, but I don’t have much time at all to dedicate to overseeing yet another project when I typically oversee about twenty or more student and group projects a semester in all of my roles combined.

I believe internships, both project based and institution based, are exceptionally useful to students, albeit in slightly different ways. Project-based internships give students project management experience and something to add to their CV. Institution-based internships (which still may be centered around a project) allow students to gain professional experience and to build their network, which will benefit them enormously as they move forward in their career. The second is often out of reach for most of my students. While we have had an enormous amount of success placing students in positions in the state of Alabama, my students have issues finding work out of state, a problem I attribute to their lack of professional connections. However, most of them cannot afford to move to DC for the summer (though we have had one who did so!), or take on an unpaid internship out of our area at the same time they are actually being charged for the credit hours (a whole other problem).

I am not sure that I have any solutions to offer at this point. I obviously want to see both my students and my interns benefit from their experience as much as possible. I want their work to benefit the organization they are working for and I want their work to lead to the development of professional skills that will help them as they move forward in their careers. However, I worry that coming from such a rural and poor area of the country, they will not find much success outside of our region and our state as they come into competition with students who have had the opportunity to work for larger and more prestigious institutions or organizations. We can only ask our students to sacrifice so much – some can’t afford the sacrifices securing such prestigious opportunities require. I am interested in listening to what solutions my fellow working group participants have come up with to address these problems.

~ Carolyn Barske, University of North Alabama/Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area

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