Austin Children's Museum
Fall 2011
Student: English Senior
Position: Blog Intern
I had one semester left to go and I still had not had any internship experience. I was stressing about this with my roommate and talked with her about how she had interned at the Austin Children’s Museum. I looked up the internships they offered and the Blog intern position sounded perfect for me. She put in a good word with them and I had an interview the next week. It was a very casual interview and you can see that they are a relaxed atmosphere with children’s crafts and toys adorning everyone’s workstation. My supervisor Emily sat down with me the first day and took two hours teaching me how to use WordPress for publishing, and other various things such as the copier and how to convert files for the internet, upload videos and so on.
So typically I would arrive in the office at 9 am and begin my day by talking with Emily about any upcoming events or anything I should write a blog post about. But, most of the time my first task in the morning was coming up with topics for children. I would spend about an hour searching the internet for any cool ideas, crafts or experiments kids would love. Once I found something, I would usually modify it to be connected to the museum in some way. Since I am artistically inclined I had a lot of posts about crafts. I would use a camera to take photos while I made a craft and then use Adobe Photoshop to edit them. Other times I would hand draw coloring activities for kids, scan them into the computer and create a downloadable PDF that parents and kids could find as a link on that particular blog post.
Towards the end of the day, when I was done creating and brainstorming, I would up the post. I had to be sure not to write in a way that pandered to children, but also not so formal that kids would be excluded. Emily would check what I had created and schedule the posts to be published in what order she saw fit, and now you can access all of my content on the blog link on their website. The best part is not only the office experience in such a creative setting, but being able to walk away with a tangible portfolio of my writing and art on the internet.
