Name: Christina Altman
Class Year: 2022
Major: History of Art and Fine Arts
Hometown: Columbia, S.C.
Internship Organization: Asian Art Museum in San Francisco
Job Title: Marketing and Digital Engagement Intern
Location: Online
Award: Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Student Support Fund
What’s happening at your internship?
Most of my work is in social media content and email creation. I’ve made several Instagram stories through Canva, searched through the museum’s database for post content, and set up emails to send to the mailing list through MailChimp. My second most involved project is creating closed captioning for IGTV videos called “Director’s Discoveries”. I’ve also been doing a little bit of webpage creation for new virtual events and data analysis for the emails sent in the past fiscal year. Another thing I do periodically is search for user generated content, posts the museum can re-post from visitors. A new exhibition has opened up called teamLab: Continuity, so I’ll continue to look for and create content for that in the coming days. I find these projects very fulfilling because I know they will be things that help the museum market itself to visitors past my internship.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied because I had never had work experience in a museum before, so when I got the chance to work with the museum, I was definitely interested in continuing my museum education beyond the classroom, especially since marketing and communications is somewhat of a less thought of area of museum work.
Was there anything special about how you found this internship?
This is actually my second internship with the Asian Art Museum (AAM). My first internship with the AAM was during the Spring semester in 2021. I took a Praxis course called Museum Studies Fieldwork Seminar, and internships are built into the curriculum. There was a lot of uncertainty around this because of COVID, but one of my professors, Monique Scott, is friends with the head of marketing and communications at the AAM, and she had reached out to my professors for interns. It was really lucky that I could have an internship in the middle of COVID, and then when the AAM had summer spots for interns, I reapplied and got it!
Working remotely for the first time? What has that experience been like for you?
It has been hard, but still very rewarding. I really enjoy getting to see real evidence of my education paying off, and luckily my internship dealing with digital engagement made it the perfect format for remote work. It is very rewarding to look back on audience interaction with my content and see the number of clicks on an email, or the amount of people viewing an Instagram story. Time management is the hardest to deal with, because computer work can be surprisingly draining. Although I would’ve loved to be actually at the museum in California, my coworkers and supervisors have been incredibly welcoming, helpful, and I’ve learned a lot from them.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.