Perspective from a museum manager - negatives of professionalizing internships
I am a museum registrar in my mid-40s. Internships when I was in college were much more casual. You didn’t get paid anything, but people were much more willing to take you on. You could write places and someone might say, sure, we could use an intern right now. Free labor for an inside look at how different careers worked. My first internship was in 1997 for an art consulting firm when I was a freshman in college, and from then I had at least one internship each semester, trying out different departments in different types of arts organizations. In addition to school and my internships, I waited tables nights and weekends.
I learned from my internships what types of jobs I enjoyed, what I was good at, what I was bad at, and what I didn’t enjoy. Through my internships, I knew I wanted to become a museum registrar and focused my attention on collections management when I went to graduate school. I never felt that my labor was being exploited by doing unpaid internships. I was rewarded with contacts in the field and people who could write me recommendations.
Nowadays, the rules are much more strict about hiring interns as we can read for ourselves in the internship megathread. At my institution, interns have to be paid, and therefore, the number of interns each department gets is limited. We hire four interns a semester and the departments that get them are curatorial, education, advancement, and membership. Registrars get zero. I would love to be able to take someone on, but HR will not allow us to take on unpaid interns and the paid internships are already established in other departments.
My personal feeling is that the push towards paid internships fails the majority of young people. Institutions limit the numbers of interns because they have to pay them, resulting in fewer people who want to start a museum career with real world experience. Turning internships into a cutthroat application process benefits the lucky few.
I’m curious to know what others think about this topic. As someone who has recently hired an entry level registrar position, I’m seeing fewer applicants with any kind of museum experience, paid or unpaid.