All posts by Katie Wedderstrand

My Last Week at MOAS

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As of yesterday, my internship came to an end. I was able to complete my docent guide and the activity sheet for Tech Savvy by Thursday and turn it in. I wanted to add extra information into the docent guide, but it was already longer than usual due to the spread of objects and themes we have in the exhibit, so it didn’t get much extra. As for organizing the back room, that will be left to the employees that work in the office that’s connected to the storage room. They seem to have ideas on how they want to organize it now that someone has done the initial push of finding some nice storage boxes.

Most of the responsibilities I had in the last week were tied to the actual summer camp. I tied up some loose ends, such as the docent guide, but for the most part I helped out with camp classes, either in the morning of afternoon. We didn’t even have any tours this week! So, overall, it felt very laid back, especially when compared to the week we were putting up Tech Savvy. However, this was not only my last week, but this was also the last week for the summer camp at MOAS for the year, so it was fun to be a part of wrapping everything up.

I enjoyed my experience at MOAS so much. I’ve already spoken with some employees there about next steps after I graduate or what to do in the meantime. I’m going to be signed up as a volunteer, so I can help out at future events between now and when I graduate Stetson in the spring. I also have plans to go back in December and help run a camp with one of the employees there! I don’t know how much I can say on that, but it’s all exciting!

Helping Out With Summer Camp

This week is the last week of my internship! It’s very sad, as I grew to really love the position and the people that I got to know because of it. The time flew by incredibly quickly. (A side note: I can’t believe the semester starts so soon, as well!) For my last week at the museum, I have been helping out/have plans to help out with a specific summer camp that one of my supervisors are running. It’s a science-based camp and the activities are run from a National Geographic activity box. The reason that I was specifically recruited is because of my specialized knowledge in rocks and minerals, and the box is partially focused towards that. One of the activities is to make your own crystals by mixing a few things together and letting it sit all week. (The kids will get them back on Friday!) Another activity they did was excavating their own minerals, such as pyrite (fool’s gold) and types of quartz, most commonly rose quartz.

Other activities the camp got up to included making volcanos! I’m not quite sure how the volcanos are meant to explode as that’s happening later in the week, but the kids were able to mix their own plaster and scoop it into a mold. The concoction was let out of the mold after thirty minutes and is not sitting to dry for a few days. The reason we did these two activities the first day is because they’re the ones that need more than one day to complete. Later in the week, they’ll be able to paint their volcanoes and explode them, as well as see how their crystals turned out. While I didn’t help out in the afternoon class today, I popped into the morning class which was about comics where the kids are spending the week learning how a multi act story is formed and then making it into a comic book that they’ll draw themselves throughout the week. It was still a lot of fun!

The Next Steps for Tech Savvy

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Now that Tech Savvy has opened, more work is, of course, to be done! One factor surrounding a gallery that someone might not think about needing to do is putting together a guide for the museum docent. A museum docent is a volunteer who gives tours on the the galleries at a museum, and because they’re going into it without any knowledge of the gallery, it’s up to the museum and those that made the exhibit to provide the most necessary and important information about the exhibit to the docent in order for them to provide the best tour possible. Putting together a docent guide isn’t always necessary for temporary exhibits but since Tech Savvy is going to be installed until December, the department decided that it would be worth it. Since I did a large amount of the labels for the exhibit, I was asked to help put together the docent guide that would go on file for the Tech Savvy exhibit.

After giving a tour today in the Root and Sloth exhibits, I spent a good part of my afternoon walking around Tech Savvy, imagining how to group the information together and how one might walk around the room so I could put all the information in a document in a fluent order. When putting the information in the document, a lot of it is copy and pasting or grabbing key information from the labels and informational posters on the walls. This part of the process doesn’t require any extra research, as it has already been done by the time the items are on display in the gallery. It’s mostly organization and thinking about the best way to present the information to the docent who will be reading the guide so they can present the information to those that they’re giving the tour to.

Organizing Fossils

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Now that the exhibit, Tech Savvy, has been opened, the office is looked for another big project to take up. Of course, the Summer Learning Institute (which is what the museum’s summer camp is called) is still underway, as well as any scheduled tours. This means that I’ve been busying myself helping out with the summer camp (watching over classes while they’re eating lunch or other tasks like that) in the afternoon while my mornings are taken up with tours of our Root and Sloth galleries with outside summer camps. A lot of aspects of the internship have become fairly routine and comfortable by this point. For example, I’ve become so familiar with the material I speak on when I give tours that I doubt I’ll forget it once I leave, so I’ll gain a plethora of new fun facts.

Beyond this, however, there’s a storage room that has some fossil material in it that’s part of the education department. It was mentioned to me upon first starting here that it might be part of my responsibilities to sort through it and organize it and, once seeing it, it is certainly a daunting task. I helped the department come up with a system that would help organize the materials in there. I found some affordable clear storage bins that could fit on shelves and have doors that open outwards (like a microwave) so it would be more easily accessible. They liked my idea and it sounded like they might go ahead and buy them, so in my future, sorting the storage room may be ahead of me.

Exhibit Opening

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Yesterday, on July 23rd, the exhibit titled Tech Savvy, opened to the public! It was very exciting. So exciting, in fact, that I took my mom and grandma to the Museum of Arts and Sciences to check out the exhibit in order to see how it would be received by the public. Finishing up the exhibit on Friday was a huge relief, as the project had been going on longer than I had been interning there. In fact, one of the first things that I did was write up a label on a vacuum from 1911 that ended up in one of the two vignettes in the exhibit. It was super cool to see a bunch of labels that I wrote up on display in the exhibit. In general, it was incredibly neat to be a part of that process and to work with a bunch of artifacts like the old typewriters, cameras, and phonographs.

One of the goals of the exhibit is to spark nostalgia from people, to get a reaction that makes them go “oh, yeah, my mom used to have one of those in her living room!” or something akin to that. Going to the exhibit with my family (ages 70 and 90), I got reactions like that to a few things, and it was very satisfying. Now that the exhibit is up, it will stay up for a few more months. A couple of my friends said that they’re going to try and stop by to see it, which is super cool! It’s fun to be a part of something that’s going to continue to be on display after I leave, even if it’s only for a little bit.

James Webb Telescope Photo Release

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NASA released photos from the James Webb telescope this Tuesday that just passed. I heard about it immediately because education’s office where I have my desk is shared by planetarium staff, so of course they were talking about it as soon as the photos were released to the public, as well as the buildup leading up to the release. While the release was on Tuesday, it’s exciting for the museum, because we were able to already get the first four photos that were released from the telescope printing and put up in the planetarium lobby and replace four older photos that were taken from the Hubble telescope. The four photos we put up on the wall was the nebula, the quintet of galaxies, the deep field which the deepest and sharpest infrared photo of the universe to date (the photo contains galaxies that are billion of years old, created during the initial Big Bang), and then lastly, the most visually appealing, the Carina Nebula. We’re going to add labels to them soon, but they’re already up and ready to be seen.

While the James Webb telescope offered a nice getaway from a current large project, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We’re currently in a bit of a limbo situation. We need to start moving objects into the gallery, as well as cleaning them up. However, they have a planned floor cleaning in the gallery, so our schedule got moved back a day, so we have a day less to get the Tech Savvy exhibit setup. So, between Tuesday and Friday, we will be cleaning the exhibit pieces and moving them into the gallery, and Monday they will be moving everything out, I presume, while they do the floor and gallery cleaning before the new items are moved in and arranged. It’s all very exciting! We’re getting very close to the opening of the exhibit.

Nearing the Deadline

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Tomorrow (Monday) will be the last day that I can submit labels for the exhibit. It’s because the exhibit, named Tech Savvy, officially goes out July 23rd. I only have two more assigned labels to do, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get them done. Information about the exhibit was covered in the Museum of Arts and Sciences newsletter. The front cover emphasizes the exhibit with a phonograph on display and the words “Tech Savvy: Home Technology from the 1890s-1990s” written beside it. We actually have technology from the 2000s, like an iMac, which will be in the exhibit that will show “the future” aspect of technology.

The opportunity I had to get to work alongside this curation project has been so much fun. I’m so incredibly happy that I’ve had this opportunity, too, because knowing that I want to work in museums but now exactly knowing where (curation, education, etc.), getting a bunch of different experiences is exactly what I need. I’d never expect that I’d have this much fun doing a curation project, but it’s made me consider looking more in that direction for the future.

Something cool which popped up from my position here at MOAS is that in this summer newsletter, they have a section where they highlight their interns. There’s only one intern per department, so there’s me in the education department and one intern in the curation department, and we each got to turn in a photo of ourselves, as well as a paragraph about ourselves. These feature pretty early on in the newsletter and it’s super neat!

MOAS Tour Exhibits

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Before officially starting at the museum, they gave me a packet for which I could get familiar with the information that pertains to two particular exhibits: The Root Family Exhibit and the Prehistoric Exhibit. The Root Family Exhibit was an exhibit donated to the museum by Chapman Root; the collection began with his grandfather, C. J. Root. The exhibit covers many things – teddy bears, train cars, classic cars, but most importantly, what ties the collection together is Coca Cola. The Root Family was instrumental into the development of the bottle that holds Coca Cola to this day. If you ever visit the museum, you will see an entire wall of bottles that were prototypes for Coca Cola but didn’t last, for one reason or another. In an adjoining gallery, the same goes for vending machines that dished out the beverage. There’s a bunch of them of them to show how they changed over the years.

The Prehistoric Gallery is another big one on tours. Kids tend to love it, because the star of the gallery is our giant ground sloth, which could stand up to thirteen feet tall. Last time I did this tour, a student asked me: “why is a dinosaur standing behind you?” It’s also a lot of fun, because the giant ground sloth and mastodon were both found and dug up in Daytona, which is a point of pride for the museum. Plus, Florida doesn’t get many giant fossil finds. Additionally, the giant ground sloth at MOAS is the most complete giant ground sloth in all of North America, so it has been used to make casts for other museums in the country. Pretty cool!

Prep for the New Exhibit

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One of the biggest jobs we have going on in the office right now, apart from summer camp, is prep for the exhibit set to be open in July. Every time I go in, I’m working on another few labels for the exhibit, which has its downsides due to the lack of identifying information on items so old, but overall, it has been a lot of fun to do! I find it to be a lot of fun researching really old radios, alarm clocks, phonographs, etc. It is a super interesting topic. One of the more funny (but still interesting items) I had to research and write a label for was a 1911 vacuum. The exhibit will include a lot of old technology, such as radios, tvs, phonographs, gramophones, 90s/00s video game consoles, etc., and so I’ve been tasked to identify them, research them, and write a small blurb on them. I think it’s a lot of fun to work with the old technology. It’s always been particularly interesting to me, and now learning about it is a part of my assigned tasks!

The staff member primarily in charge of collecting items for the exhibit brought in about twenty more items from someone who previously collected and now wants to see them preserved and in an exhibit. These items alone were just radios/clocks/alarm clock radios/etc., so I spent the day going through the items, looking for brand names, model numbers, serial numbers, or anything else that would be useful in identifying what the item is. Interspersed between that task, I would work on labels for a list I was given that contains a lot of old phonographs, old home video game consoles, etc. I’d write 1-3 paragraphs going over the history, their function, how it works, and so on. All of this took about a week and I just finished (until I’m assigned more as there’s still more items), so it was a very rewarding task, especially because I’ll get to see all of my work displayed in an exhibit!

My First Week At MOAS

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I started at the Museum of Arts and Sciences this week on Wednesday and had a lot of firsts. I shadowed my supervisor as she gave a tour in the Root exhibit which goes over the history of the Root family, a family which bottled for Coca-Cola and donated a bunch of Coca-Cola memorabilia to the museum; I also shadowed one of the other staff members as she gave a tour of the Prehistory exhibit, an exhibit which holds fossils (namely a giant ground sloth) as these are the two exhibits that I’ll be giving tours on throughout the summer to summer camp groups for younger kids. I was also able to sit in on a planetarium show for the young kids and it was fun to see how excited they got for the live show. I met everyone in the Education Department and got familiar with their roles and how I’ll fit in!

Apart from beginning to revise and shadow for tours, I was also given the responsibility to make labels for a new exhibit we’re planning to open. There’s about ten or so different items that I need to research and give a summary on (when I say label, I’m referring to the description one would find under or beside an object under a museum that describes its origin, function, reason for being there, etc.). It’s a lot of fun, even if it is a lot of work! I’m learning a lot by doing it and I can’t wait to have the exhibit open knowing that I had a hand in making it.

The staff at the museum are incredibly kind and I’ve been quick to fit in there, which is nice. I was worried about feeling left out, but they’re already including me in their jokes and conversations, especially since the lunchbreaks are in the small office for the Education Department, so it only took about a day or so before I was tagging along on tasks and part of some of the inside jokes. All in all, it has been a lot of fun and I’m incredibly excited to get back to work next week! I can’t wait to see what it has in store.