Interns are one of many resources museums leverage in order to tackle projects that would otherwise remain undone.
For as long as museum internships have existed, the vast majority of them have been unpaid. In fact, much of the arts and humanities sector has operated with unpaid internships as the only type of internship available. This is of course evidence of a much larger devaluation problem— but internships are one of the foundational issues. The next few posts in this series will outline how to build a meaningful internship experience, detail how to calculate a fair compensation model for an internship, review the financial formats available when building a paid internship program, and describe how to fundraise for it. To begin the series, this post will focus on why paid internships are so important.
Criteria for an Intern
First, let’s review the criteria for who can be considered an “intern”.
An Intern is…
If the potential intern is not new to their career in the field nor recently graduated then they are actually potential employees NOT interns. These distinctions are important as you construct a paid internship model or program. The criteria for what is considered an internship versus a job can have legal, financial, and ethical implications. It’s important to check-in with your Human Resources representative and legal counsel to ensure your program meets any location-specific rules.
Not All Interns Can Afford an Internship
Understanding the criteria for who qualifies as an intern helps to underscore why it’s so important that these internships are paid. The stereotypical person who can afford to participate in an unpaid internship represent just a small fraction of those who are seeking career-important internship experiences.
Why Paid Internships?
You may know that paid internships are important, but haven’t yet put all the pieces together as to why. This is an important part of the process because you will most likely have to lobby for a paid internship program at your museum. With the relatively recent field-wide adoption of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, an extensive cache of research on the subject is available for our advocacy.
Paid Internships Support:
To learn more, please check out the Resources section at the end of this post for more literature on “Why paid internships?”.
Potential interns are a resource for the museum, but they’re also our colleagues and the future of our field. How we treat them, how we value (aka compensate) them, is indicative of how we value the work performed. Our treatment of them sets the tone. This is partly why unpaid internships are considered one of the foundational issues that contributes to field-wide devaluation of all of our work. Now that we’re working with the same understanding of who an intern is and why it’s important to offer paid internships, we can review further details of how to create a meaningful internship experience.
Resources:
This content was originally published here.
