Au Revoir, Revere!

This week, I completed my summer internship at the Paul Revere House, one of the earliest historic house museums of the United States, located in the oldest building in downtown Boston. This was the first museum I had worked at, and I couldn’t have started my museum career at a better working environment. Being a small museum of around 20-25 staff members, I got to see the daily routines of each of them. Each and every member of the staff (except for the Executive Director) spends a certain amount of their work hours interacting with visitors, which gives them a direct insight about the public opinions and experiences. I was told that this was very different than how it is done in bigger or even mid-sized museums, where curators and supervisors remain tucked away in their offices, away from the public. After observing the staff do the museum interpretation for a couple of days, I was given the task to do the interpretation myself, which is basically explaining about the house and its history to the visitors. This gave me a great opportunity to work on my public speaking skills while interacting with people of all ages. As a research project, I wrote a detailed article about the restoration work behind the Revere house, and the controversies surrounding it. My work and responsibilities were made 10x easier by the excellent group of co-workers, who all have diverse backgrounds, and some of them have been here for 40+ years! I believe that really says a lot about the work environment of the place. Overall, it was a meaningful experience for me, one that I will carry with me whichever museum I work at next.