9:00 to 5:00

Tomorrow marks the end of the fourth week of my internship at the Portland Children's Museum and the end of the first week of PSU summer term. I have yet to do any real reflecting about what I'm gaining from my internship experience. 

Here are some pigeons I drew on Illustrator to get things rolling.

At the beginning of this internship, I knew it was being structured as purely copywriting, but in the back of my mind I knew I wanted to sneak in some graphic design. 

I definitely managed to accomplish that. After writing my first two press releases (the drafts of which the Marketing Director has yet to give back to me), Emily, my supervisor and the Marketing Assistant, handed me her idea of featuring an arts and crafts project monthly in the newsletter. I got to research them, then do them, then lay them out in Illustrator. 

I'm also helping with another one of Em's ideas of making recycled crafts as a facebook promotion for KidsBuild. 

I happen to be at the museum during a very exciting time. They've just added an outdoor feature, with talk of more to come, and the website is undergoing a major redesign, which means it will finally have a PR archive, more photos, and a different newsletter format. 

I can't help but think that there is so much more I could be doing. I'm held back by my limited position, my lack of experience, utter lack of knowledge about the institution, and general timidity. I don't know how to establish my self and I don't know enough to have good ideas for things. I just wait around to be told what to do, and while I'm enjoying laying things out in photoshop and making snowmen out of hot glue, I can't help but feel this is just busy work. I want to be challenged, instead of just being a little bit confused. I want to find direction, not just be directed.

Maybe I could stand to take a page out of the museum's mission... The museum emphasizes that the focus and impetus for learning is the process and experience of... whatever. It's not about the end product so much as what you learn on the way there. 

In the Marketing department, we're very project oriented. We want to do and make things in order for us to look good and be seen, so that people will give us money (a very crude definition of marketing ). My craft projects were all chosen based on whether the outcome was good (I don't want kids making stuff that I wouldn't want to keep.)

But stuff like Ooblek (cornstarch + water = great ) holds a really important spot in a craft time. Crafting, for kids, is about creating quality time, not necessarily quality product.

While that is not really true for what Marketing does, I realize I should really get in to what I'm doing, and look hard, and try harder to ask around for what more I can do. Can I make promotional videos? Can I write more articles? Can I interview children? I don't want to take anyone's job, but I want to do work that I'm proud of doing. I want to do my job, and do it well.