What I learned in a boat museum is…

I hope you all got that Spongebob reference, except I actually learned a lot working at the Independence Seaport Museum as a Marketing and PR intern.  The experience gave me a chance to learn how to do tasks that I wouldn’t learn inside a classroom.  I got to go to office meetings that I wouldn’t get to experience in Annenberg.  And overall my time at the Museum was a valuable tool to learn the aspects of a full time job that I can’t see in a classroom and decide which of those I want and do not want.

I worked in a small office setting, only meeting and coming into contact with no more than ten people.  This is a setting that many people enjoy; not having to meet a new person every time you come into work and only needing to communicate with the same people every day.  I didn’t mind this aspect of the Museum, however I love meeting new people and being able to collaborate with different people all the time to constantly change my personal work ethic.

A part of my internship was to maintain and update the Museum’s website, which included adding new images from events and information for visitors to the website.  It can be a very tedious process at times, but I learned that it’s something I actually enjoy.  It may seem like a really unimportant aspect of a company, but the majority of the time a website is the first thing a customer sees from a company and it is important that it looks good.

I could go into a lot of detail about what I learned and how it is or is not something I’d like to pursue in my future, but it’s a lot.  So overall, my advice to any future interns reading this post is to use your internship as a tool to figure out the aspects of having a full time job that you do and do not enjoy.  You’re not guaranteed to like everything you learn or everybody that you meet, but learn from it and use it as a tool to help you figure out future.