guest blogger: Elyse Bailey (Intern at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology)

Usually when the name “Intern” comes to mind, most people think of a young, determined student looking for future connections, more experience in their field of study, and a resume booster. That dreamy description is typically ruined by the thought that this brilliant student is stuck running dull errands, like coffee runs and standing by a photocopier for hours wondering why the clock isn’t going any faster. Even though I have only been with the Petrie Museum for 3-4 weeks, I still have yet to run into any horrifying experiences and hopefully I won’t, but you never know. The jobs that I have helped with thus far have been fairly relaxed tasks, but they’ve kept me quite busy. I’ve been assigned responsibilities from helping set up for a night event to copying the written archives into a word document. Nothing has taken me by surprise and nothing has been super overwhelming. But, what’s great about being assigned these tasks is that I feel like I’m getting the bigger picture as to how a museum operates and what people need to do in order to keep it standing. If I have learned anything so far, it’s that I really underestimated the skill set that people need in order to work at a museum.

Flinders Petrie, a face I am now quite used to!
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From August 2010 to March 2011 I did an Internship at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. During that time I did many different things for the Petrie. One of my last jobs is it now to write about my experience and let other people know what a great place the Petrie Museum of Archaeology is.

To start I would like to introduce myself first. My name is Katrin and I am a German student of Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. I was always very curious about museum work and decided to take a holiday semester to do an Internship at a museum to see what is going on from the professional side. I had never worked in a museum before and never heard of the Petrie Museum until the day one of my Professors in Berlin highly recommended me there for an Internship. That is how, luckily for me, one thing led to another and I was hired as a “special project administrator”.; soon I could find myself in the middle of the Petrie world (or how my supervisor Debbie would call it “in the middle of Madness”).
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