I forgot to mention it in my last post there was a big burglary at the museum last week. Initially, I did not realize how much equipment was stolen and how that would affect my duties over the week. I worked as a photographer a couple times because the damages needed to be documented and I also took photos of a press conference with the museum’s president, which should be later used in social media pages and to encourage police authorities to increase surveillance in the area where the museum is located. One of the strategies to keep attracting people to the museum, in spite of such events, is to promote the tours and art workshops organized by the education department. Thus, I have been collaborating with them to create content that is going to be shared via email to remind our audience of the services the museum has to offer. (Check out my progress below)

Although I have gotten to improve a lot of my technical skills by interim at the graphic design department, appreciating the role of art in society has been my biggest take away from this week. Amidst the political, economic and social crisis my home country is facing, I have noticed art provides a respite to the audience from their reality while it helps artists process and express their experiences living here. In my experience, artistic expression has helped me understand myself and the world around me; thus, interim at a place that empowers artist has been very rewarding and I look forward to helping   as much as I can during this especially difficult time.

CEO normally stands for “Chief Executive Officer,” but at Stetson it also stands for the department of Continuing Education and Outreach. During the school year we handle Test Prep, Educational Travel, Continuing Education, and more. For the summer, we work with the various camps and conferences that are held at Stetson or by Stetson.

The department hires Conference Assistants (CAs) to act as RAs for the summer. These CAs handle check-in/check-out, lockouts, missing keys, supervising meals, etc. As the Marketing and Media Intern, I am in charge of taking pictures and promoting our summer camps.

One of the first camps we had was the Stetson L.E.A.D. camp. The CAs hosted nightly activities for the campers to play.

On the last day of camp the campers went to the Florida Youth Ranch and were tasked with completing various obstacle courses.

These courses and activities allowed the campers to learn applicable life and leadership skills.

Throughout the summer we’ve also been hosting camps by STEAM Society. It’s a day camp so these campers don’t stay on campus, but during the day they work with either Minecraft, Robotics, or Videography.

The Minecraft camp teaches about coding and being able to make your own mods to customize the game.

Robotics involves making robots and how to get them to do specific tasks and navigate obstacles.

In the Videography camp, the campers are making videos about whatever they want to.

They’re learning about lighting, audio, angles, editing, etc.

We don’t do much with the other camps (i.e. music camps) while they’re on campus except for look after them and just make sure they can get into their rooms. As a whole though, the department handles room rentals and renting out spaces for the camps.

I’m not a CA, but if anybody needs a job for next summer it’s a fun time. They pay for you to stay on campus as well as most of your meals, and it’s overall a really great time.

So far this week, I have worked on content for the museum’s Instagram page. These are images that are going to be posted as Instagram stories to promote the start of the art summer camp next week, the next exhibit—scheduled for the end of this month—and “La Fiesta del Arte”, which is a sort of art festival that usually follows exhibition openings. I have encountered a couple challenges when working on this assignment. First of all, it was difficult to find the dimensions that would show perfectly on all devices. Initially, I found the dimensions that worked for my phone. However, when my supervisor visualized it on her phone, which had a smaller screen, the image was cropped, so I had to redesign it to work around that. On the other hand, it is been interesting to keep in mind the format as I worked. I am used to thinking everyone is going to visualize my design on a platform as big as my computer screen, so I have made a conscious effort to imagine how my work would look on a cell phone or IPad screen.

Additionally, the museum’s style is very minimalistic, so I have made a mental note to not overdo it in this assignment (I am fascinated by intricate and elaborate designs, so I might unconsciously try to emulate them sometimes). Sticking to such style has challenged me to pay more attention to the layout and composition of my designs. Because I am limited to only a few graphic elements, I feel it becomes very obvious when there is a lack of harmony between them and where there is no balance in the composition.

Despite such challenges, I cannot wait to see my designs on the museum’s Instagram stories. I will be posting screenshots as soon as my excitement wears off!

This week there was no summer camp because it was sort of a break due to 4th of July. That’s why my supervisor Nicole had asked us to come in for only one day during the week. On that day we were supposed to tour one group in the morning, but they never showed up, so the start of the day was unexpectedly slow. But on the bright side, we finally finished painting rocks for the social media promo of the museum, and we ended up with approximately forty rocks, so they should be placed in Daytona parks for children to find rather soon.

This particular rock I painted of a prehistoric llama was my favorite.

Now that this project is done, we plan to organizing ideas for a coloring book we have to design and illustrate. The old coloring book the museum had didn’t have the best design, with the typography being inconsistent, and some of the sentences would have been hard to read or understand for kids. The old illustrations themselves weren’t bad, but since is now our project, it would only be fitting if we improved the illustrations. Aside from that, we want to make the coloring book more engaging by adding mazes and crossword puzzles.

Additionally, Seth had asked us to paint the solar system planets using styrofoam balls, but we won’t be starting that project until he gets back from his paternity leave.

Next week summer camp will be picking up again, and hopefully more projects to work on aside from Seth’s planets and the coloring book.

My work at the museum this week focused on designing content for the Instagram page. I did several sketches since it is an image they plan to use in their Instagram story every time there is a new exhibit.

From the 5 sketches, I selected 3 and I digitized them. I will work on improving some details before I present it to my supervisor on Tuesday. As I was sketching and digitizing this week, I often asked for feedback from my supervisor. Although she liked what I was proposing, she told me it still did not fit with the museum’s style, which led me to go back to my sketchbook and do more research on their social media publications. Through this project, I have learned the importance of always doing enough research to deliver a product that reflects the brand and style of your client’s business.
On Saturday, there were different activities in the museum such as yoga classes and art workshops for children so I worked as a photographer and I edited the photos afterward. On the other hand, after two weeks of neglect due to the exhibits and all the work they entailed, this week I finally started working on the newsletter again. I finished resizing and uploading images to the online hosting service; I troubleshoot the whole newsletter since some of the tables had been giving me problems, and I added all the inline styles because it is not practical to use CSS stylesheets. I still need to add a few more tables and text,  proofread everything,  and add buttons before presenting it to my supervisor.  Check out a video of the work in progress below.

So far, one of my favorite aspects of my internship has been working in different projects that relate to the courses I have taken this last academic year such as Graphic Design, Intro to Computing and Web Design.

This holiday week was a much needed reset for the education department and MOAS. Since we had no camp classes and no planned tours, we were only required to come in on Wednesday. Though of course unexpected things do happen and as such was the case of Monday, when a group appeared unexpectedly. A secondary group of younger students were suppose to show up on Wednesday but, they never did. That gave the cleaning staff a chance to give the Children’s Musuem and the classrooms a much needed deep clean. Additionally, inventory was taken and the classrooms were restocked for the latter half of summer camps.

In terms of projects, we finally culminated our work on the MOAS rocks and ended up with a grand total of 40+ rocks. They represent every permanent collection that the museum has as well as the planetarium in some form. This upcoming week we will most likely pick up where we left off in the touching up of the fossil cast and when Seth comes back from paternal leave we will touch bases with him about the mobile planetarium project.

So far, our actual hands on experience inside the classrooms has been limited but, that isn’t completely unexpected since there is an abundance of volunteers at least in the first half. Instead we’ve  had a chance to see more clearly how the department works and interacts with other departments. We’ve helped expensively in terms of registration, tours and maintaining and updating the department’s teaching material. Our time there has been an understanding of how things work behind the curtents, of how much planning and human capital is actually put into a weekly project.

This week was the first of two weeks of Endstation’s Embark! Theatre Conservatory of which I was a teaching assistant for. I was the teaching assistant for the improvisation and acting classes which were taught as six classes throughout the day. Half of the day was spent with improv and the other half with acting. There were three levels of classes, the youngest class was C1 which was rising 3rd through 5th graders, C2 was rising 6th-8th graders, and C3 was rising 9th-12th graders. The first day we played a lot of different name games and a few short acting exercises. The first half of the week there was a large focus on volume and diction in the acting and improv classes and we spent a lot of time going around in a circle speaking phrases such as “eleven benevolent elephants” and really working on enunciating every sound in every word. During the week we played other games such as freeze which involves two people on the stage and then everyone sits on the ground and the two people begin a scene and at some point during the scene someone in the audience yells freeze and the people on stage freeze, the audience members comes on stage and quickly chooses one of the actors to tag out and then they proceed to take that persons position and  begin a new two person scene and so on. The C3’s had a pretty easy time understanding that the goal of the game is not to see how many times you could be onstage but rather to work and develop scene based on the body position of the person that was in before them and to create an entirely new scene that has a relationship between the characters and a driving force behind the scene and all that good stuff. The C2’s sort of understood this but there were a number of them that just wanted to be in the scene as much as possible so it was hard for other people to get a turn and also hard for the scenes to develop without just getting cutoff. We played this version of freeze with the C1’s but it was just all kinds of a mess and that led to us playing a different version called ata-freeze where there was no talking and instead you start with one person onstage and they strike a pose and then the next person comes on and strikes a pose based off of the other person’s pose and as soon as they have done that the first person exits and so on and so forth. This ended up working really well for the C1’s and they were able to play the game and enjoy it instead of getting upset when they were tagged out or instead of not really creating a scene but instead just chasing each other around the room. We played a few other  versions of freeze with the C2’s and C3’s including screaming british freeze and screaming southern freeze where the scenes could be about anything but they had to scream all dialogue in an accent. These types of freeze were almost more successful than regular freeze because it forces the actors to make bold decisions and therefore they have more energy and better scene content. There was one other version of freeze called blind freeze which I only learned myself a few months ago and it is basically regular freeze except you stand in a line while waiting to go onstage and the first person in line has their back turned to the scene and it is the second person in line that yells freeze, then the first person turns around and runs in and tags out one of the people in the scene and starts a new scene based on the body position they have acquired.

This week was rather unusual because the Planetarium curator, Seth, who also works with the education department, was having a baby. He had to leave work early, which meant that another intern, Julia, had to run the planetarium shows. Normally she would help us organize tour groups, and would even assist with groups if there were many of them, however, given the circumstances, me and Ariana had to deal with the groups on our until some visiting docents   arrived.

This week was also the first time we had to manage groups that were “self-guided”, meaning that there wouldn’t be anyone working in the museum guiding them through, but we still had to make sure we kept an eye on them and making sure they were showing proper museum etiquette. The first self-guided tour was a large special-needs group. For the most part, the counselors of the group had everything under control, but I made sure to hand them maps so that no one would get lost or separated.

By the end of the week we also had to take photographs of the summer camp for a staff member in Administration to have. She let us borrow her camera, and we took pictures outside where the 7-9 yr olds were having their own Olympic games. For that particular group we had to help the instructor because the kids were rowdier than usual and kept getting distracted. We also faced a challenge of leaving out certain kids from photographs because their parents didn’t consent for their child to be photographed (they sent us paperwork during registration). After that, I photographed the 10-13 yr olds during their “Claymation” class while Ariana gave a tour to a small group of 4, and later we finished photographing the preschoolers in their “pirate class”.

Another week of camp at MOAS has passed and this one marks the end of the first half of SLI summer camps. As usual, on Monday, Thanya and me where in charge of overseeing the registration of 4-6 year olds. For the most part I saw an abundance of returning campers in all age levels with new ones here and there. Something interesting that I did notice was the fact that this week we had more issues with late arriving campers particularly in the 4-6 age group. Drop off begins at 9 am and usually run until 9:30 am but, on Monday we had someone come in as late as 10:30 am. That causes issues in maintaining our attendence records straight as parents forget to check in with us at the education office. Overall, the issue was handled by us or one of the department members when the parent came to pick up the child.

In terms of assisting in the classes this week, we had the chance to do so on Friday. The class was history based and as a final activity the kids were having there own version of the Olympic Games. We helped explain activities to student as well as maintained them organized to ensure that the activity ran as smoothly as possible. After that we took photos of the different classes and their final activities for our records and the marketing department.

Tours were definitely the low point of this week as Wednesday proved to be the busiest and most chaotic day thus far. For the group of 100 students we had already arranged a plan but, unfortunately mechanical issues with their buses forced us to rearrange our schedule. In the second group we had expected a smaller number of visitors yet, instead we ended up with nearly 90 in total. We obviously were caught off guard by the sheer number of visitors in terms of scheduling and staff (Nicole was teach class, Zach was at an outreach, Kelsey is in Hawaii and Seth and his wife just has there baby on Tuesday). In the end, we did our best to accommodate the groups but, this goes to show that we have to be prepared for anything and that communication with visiting group is of the utmost importance.

We’ve continued the MOAS rocks project from last week and have begun to work on the representation of the North Wing’s permanent collections. There has been discussions of the logistical aspect of the project such as where we plan to place the rocks, how often and if they should be exclusive to children’s admission. Discussions in regards to this will of course continue when the final project is presented to administration. The fossil cast touch up has momentarily been placed on hold since the department has a couple of outreach programs and is using the casts.

Next week we have no camps and that will give us a chance to clean classrooms and restock on supplies.  We hope to wrap up the MOAS rock project and pick up on the touch up project and a new project for the planetarium’s mobile exhibit.

Since last week I took photos of the exhibits, I spent most of my Monday doing some editing and retouching work as well as sharing the images, which I included below. Like I mentioned in my previous post, last week I collaborated to create the certificates for the winners of the art contest for high school students, so this week I was given the task of working on the online certificates for all the participants, so I continued to work in InDesign on Tuesday and Wednesday to complete this assignment. This week was also particularly exciting because I was asked to work on images for the social media pages of the museum. Although the task was intimidating at first because I had never worked in content for a social media platform specifically, I had the chance to research the formats and resolutions that are generally used. Because I want to stick to the visual identity of the museum, I also went through the museum’s Facebook and Instagram pages to get a better understanding of their aesthetic.

Last semester, in Advanced Digital Arts studio, I learned to collaborate with people from different disciplines to complete a project; this week I was challenged to work similarly since in order to successfully create one of the images for social media, I had to verify the information with the people working in the education department (the post was for them) while I was regularly checking the design with my supervisor in the graphic design department  and communicating with the community manager to effectively deliver the final product.

This upcoming week, I am excited to keep working on the other image for social media and go back to work on the newsletter.