The Assignment

This morning, I recieved the final word on what I'll be doing this summer and it didn't come a moment too soon.  Right now, I'm in the process of packing two months worth of clothes (and as many shoes) into my little Jeep, and getting ready for tomorrow's cross-country trek back to Detroit.

So here's the lowdown on my intern assignment:

The American Association of Museum Directors is offering its members the opportunity to develop maps that depoct the educational outreach of the museum. What geographic areas are being reached? What economic demographics are being reached? These are great maps -- sort of like weather maps -- color-coded to show the extent or density of contact.

The DIA is positioning itself to go out with a ballot initiative in 2011 or 2012, in which we will ask voters to approve a millage tax that would give us a sustainable source of funding, and allow our fundraising to go towards building endowment, rather than supporting basic operations. The maps availabe through the AAMD will be very valuable to understand who we're reaching and where we might want or need to place more focus.

Your primary project will be compiling an inventory of all of our educational programs and initiatives, pulling together the details necessary for the mapping project.

This project will involve meeting with representatives of the departments that provide education and outreach, conducting interviews with museum staff and external contacts, reviewing records and developing a database to organize the pertinent information. You will need to understand the needs of the AAMD mapping team, and you may need to interface directly with them.

This should be a very interesting project that will give you some interesting insight to the value and relevance of our museum to the community.

In addition, you will have an opportunity to assist our evaluators in conducting a Visitor Satisfaction survey and analyzing the data.

Depending on time and logistics, we will arrange for you to work on some smaller projects or assignments with various departments, to give you some insight into those aspects of the museum's operations; and you'll attend our monthly Managers' Meetings and other meetings that may be of value for an "inside" perspective of the museum's operations.
 
I'm pretty happy with this description.  My main professional interests center around programming, education, outreach, and visitor services... so this sounds like a good match.
 
Now it's back to packing.  See you in Detroit!