I found out about this internship as I was scrolling through the website for my school work. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) holds a strong place in my heart, but I never thought about interning there as it doesn’t have a connection to my major. It was a stroke of luck that I manage to secure it as I found it three days from the application deadline date. My amazing professors were extremely kind and helped me write a letter of recommendation (I found out later it was my letters of recommendation that pushed me ahead of everyone else). Otherwise, using the 3 days, I asked as many people as I could to read through all my materials, including Career Development and my Academic Advisor. 
NMWA in Washington, DC champions and supports women artists. It is the only museum in the world solely dedicated to women artists. They feature a variety of art forms, mostly focusing on contemporary art. The department I worked in was Digital Engagement, this applied to all social media platforms, website, photography, all online activity. My direct supervisor was the director of Digital Engagement. As NMWA is quite small, her role encompasses almost everything related to the department other than website coding.
My list of responsibilities varied during my internship, depending on what the department needed help with. I drafted Instagram posts highlighting women artists/art pieces, wrote tweets for Fresh Talks and calendar events, researched and wrote about exhibitions for the website, edited and sorted old photographs to upload to a digital server, photographed weekly gallery talks and events, researched and read case studies for previous museum’s social media initiatives during closure, and made guides for future interns.
I am most proud of the connections I made through exhibition openings and talking to curators about their work. I never thought I would experience a job like this, so I made sure to learn as much as I could doing many different things. My biggest take-away and clarification of my career goal is that I would rather not work a 9am-5pm job when I’m older. This experience was amazing, but only because I worked with a museum that championed women artists. It’s hard to imagine putting in this type of time for an organization/company that doesn’t have a good ethos. With working Monday to Friday and commuting from Baltimore, the time to make art was extremely condensed. I learned that social media is currently one of the largest factors of business success. The Digital Engagement department is linked to every single other department and social media brings in more people than any other platforms (e.g. advertisements, email, print) for the museum.
