Throughout the course of my internship so far with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program, I have had the opportunity to participate and be a part of a variety of new and unique experiences. These experiences have been different than most of the ones I had as a part of both my undergraduate and graduate careers. As a result, these experiences have pushed me to develop a variety of new skills to meet the expectations of what is required of me for this internship.
Out of all the skills I have developed so far, the most important one has been time management. As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I have struggled with procrastinating and putting off work until the last minute. It has always been important for me to stay on top of my work, but that has become even more relevant this semester with my busy schedule. This semester in addition to the work I have to do for my internship, I am also taking another graduate history class, that requires me to do a significant amount of reading and writing each week. In addition to that, I also work a full time job forty hours a week. With my life being so busy I found that it has been very important for me to effectively manage my time to be able to get all of my work done for my internship. I have found that planning out my day and giving myself set times to accomplish certain tasks has been effective at keeping me focused and on track to get my work done.
Another skill that I have developed so far is learning to be flexible and open to changes and suggestions from other people. For the Collections Based Hazards Flipbook project that I am working on, I am part of a team of individuals that is all working to complete this one project. An important part of working with this team has been to be open to feedback and suggestions that they have about the work I have done on the project. Originally we were planning on using Microsoft Access to publish the dataset we had on the National Collections Program’s website, and I had been researching information and spending time learning how to use Microsoft Access. Recently though, we decided that Microsoft Access was not the best tool to use in publishing the database online. As a result, I had to shift my focus away from learning and researching about Access to focusing on a new software. I have learned from this to both be flexible and be willing to change as things out of my control happen.
Going forward, I plan on learning and developing on few new skills that will help me with my work on the Flipbook project. I will be learning more about how to use and work with both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Teams. Both of these programs we have identified as potential ways of publishing the database we have online. To be able to effectively use these two programs I will be taking some online courses and working with both Teams and Excel to learn how they could be useful to the project’s goal of getting a Collections Based Hazards Flipbook on the National Collections Program’s website that can be accessed by the general public.
