It has been two months since I first came to intern at the social media department in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). The internship is ending in two weeks.
I haven’t felt sad about saying goodbye yet. I’m grateful and fulfilled to have been able to work at my favorite museum in the world where I could walk through the galleries for a break after lunch. The creative freedom and advice my supervisors gave me will benefit my education and professional skills.
I want to share with you all my experience working at The Met to give you insights into what it’s like to work at such an expansive, encyclopedic museum. The Met houses a collection of artifacts that scatter across a timeline of more than 5,000 years. There are 17 curatorial departments in the museum and more than 2,000 staff members. Everyday operations involve a lot of collaborative work.
I’m an undergraduate writing student at SCAD. At The Met, I work in the social media department with a team of four, including another intern. My two supervisors manage the museum’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest accounts. My primary supervisor writes more than 2,000 tweets per year. Some of the things I do at work are:
- Social media analytics (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest)
- Draft Facebook events
- Create pins for The Met’s Pinterest — which I select images of artworks from the museum collection for different Pinterest boards. My favorite boards are “Lady in Red,” “Met Selfies” and “The Wedding: A Visual Feast.”
- Write tweets for Twitter — primarily on introducing the video series, “The Artist Project.” The series invites visual artists to the museum to talk about their favorite objects in the collection. It’s really interesting to see how their perspectives differ from those of curators — they focus less on the object’s history and socioeconomic aspects and more on their meaning and emotional dimensions.
- Write “Met in the News” at the end of every week. It’s a report of any notable mention of the museum on social media. It’s especially great on Twitter when I see important figures, like the Mayor of Paris, retweeting a Met post, or the Chancellor of Austria writing about the museum.
- Curate “Featured Artwork of the Day” posts. The Met selects one artwork from their collection each day and shares it on Facebook. I curate which artworks go up and schedule them for the next couple of months. I love that I can present a diverse spectrum of works from different cultures that reflect The Met’s encyclopedic collection. I also love to see people’s comments on these posts as they are so positive and supportive of the museum.
My favorite task has been creating Instagram stories. My supervisor asked me to brainstorm some Instagram story ideas — so I compiled a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation that introduces my ideas and sample stories designs.
We started with two ideas so we could build a solid foundation of stories. There’s the “Today at The Met” series and quizzes on The Met’s collection. For “Today at The Met,” I create slides that introduce events and programs that go on every day. For example, a slide for the guided tours schedule, educational events like “MetPerspective” or family programs like “Start with Art at The Met.” For quizzes, I create questions about The Met collection utilizing the poll feature in Instagram stories. For example, I would ask viewers if the Greek column in the slide is a doric or ionic order, or if a period room belongs to a French hotel or a palace (it’s hard to distinguish, trust me).
I didn’t take my foundation classes in vain as skills that I learned from CMPA came in handy when I applied graphic design principles to the slides I made. I’m very lucky to have supervisors who let me unleash my creative freedom and execute my ideas on a platform with millions of followers.
We have around 50 interns for the museum this semester. There are weekly intern seminars and our program directors organize tours, lectures or sharing sessions for us. They invited a curator, staff from the public relations department and my supervisors to talk to us. They also brought us to the Costume Institute Conservation Laboratory where experts restore 17th-century French gowns and the registrar office that handles all of the acquisition paperwork, loans, storage, packaging and shipping.
The directors care about our learning experience and provided office hours for us to talk to them about our career goals. After a talk with one of the directors, she set me up to meet staff across departments. I met with a curator from the ancient Near Eastern Art wing, a research associate from the Costume Institute who was working on their highly anticipated spring exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” in conjunction with the 2018 Met Gala and an associate producer from the digital department who worked on the Webby Award-winning “MetKids” series.
My time at SCAD definitely prepared me for this internship. As a writing student, our professors at Ivy Hall often invited writers from the industry to talk to us about their work, internships and job experiences so we could get a glimpse of what it’s like in the workforce. The sense of professionalism and timeliness that comes from my time at SCAD is something my supervisor appreciated.
For SCAD Bees who are interested in interning at The Met, don’t underestimate yourself. Consider applying for their fall semester undergraduate and graduate internships. For more information on these internships, check out their website here.
