Caring from the Start: Why We Must Invest in Interns as the Future of Museums
Sierra Van Ryck deGroot
Introduction
As an internship supervisor, I am often asked, “how did you get to where you are now?” My answer typically centers the internships I have held and my term as co-president of the National Emerging Museum Professional Network (NEMPN). These experiences have led me to my current role in overseeing one of the largest, oldest, and most competitive museum internship programs in the United States.
I am also a product of thoughtful mentorship and community care in the museum field. I now do what others have done for me: guide interns into their careers, help them build their networks, and support them when considering alternative pathways to their careers of choice. As an internship program supervisor, I try to be thoughtful in how I prepare and support incoming, current, and former interns and mentees who are interested in arts and cultural heritage work.
Emerging museum professionals are both the most influential segment of the museum sector and the most influenced. They are championed as the future of the field, the ones who will steward the frequently discussed “future of museums,” while also being the most affected by the changing nature of museum work. They are the first to go as the budgets tighten. Funneled into “expendable roles,” they are often on the floor facing the public. They are also subject to the most varied versions of hiring processes across the sector— riddled with “ghosting” and poor communication—engendering resentment for wasted time and low wages. Not all museum interns become museum professionals, but this essay will focus on those who are planning to join the arts and cultural heritage profession. Any plan to envision the future of museums must center attention to and investment in our earliest career colleagues.
Museum Internships: Past and Present
Before we can plan the future of museums, we must first understand how museum work became a profession. Museum scholar Stephen E. Weil argued that, after the end of World War II, US-based museums were concerned primarily with gathering, preserving, and studying the record of human and natural history. Any public access to these collections was an additional benefit. It would not be until the 1980s and 1990s, according to Weil, that the concept of a museum expanded from simply storing objects to being “a transformed and redirected institution that can, through its public-service orientation, use its very special competencies in dealing with objects to contribute positively to the quality of individual human lives and to enhance the well-being of human communities.”1
This shift led professional organizations like the American Association of Museums (now the American Alliance of Museums, or AAM) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to emphasize the importance of museum work as a trained profession, highlighting the benefits of various disciplines of museum specialists. While historically museum specialists fell under curatorial departments or collections or registration, the “new museum worker,” as described by Weil, would also need to meet the call for public engagement and programming in museums, as well as audience research and evaluation. These newer specializations spoke to the urgency for community engagement in museum spaces, leading to an increase of formal and informal educational programs and practical training for the aspiring new museum worker.
Just 50 years later, there are now over 250 museum studies or similarly disciplined degree or certificate programs worldwide. For many of the US-based programs, there is an expectation for students to not only complete their coursework but also take what they have learned in the classroom into the field through internships or fellowships. As an internship supervisor, I make sure that any positions I oversee meet the definition of an internship outlined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) as “a form of experiential learning that integrates knowledge and theory learned in the classroom with a practical application and skills development in a professional workplace setting (across in-person, remote, or hybrid modalities).” While not every paid internship meets all best practices, they tend to be more intentionally planned and structured experiences compared to unpaid internships because program coordinators must justify the need and purpose for the funds. Although the US Department of Labor has outlined and published a means test for what classifies as a legal unpaid internship, unpaid interns do not always receive the quality of experience they are seeking or the mentorship they need to grow. Plainly put, unpaid internships rely on mutually problematic issues of exploitation while maintaining an illusion of additional capacity without the funding for more sustainable, permanent museum roles.
Investing in the Future of Museums
When designing an internship or a larger internship program, it’s important to consider not only mentorship and training but also how the program is advancing the future of museums. Unpaid internships perpetuate the ongoing issue of suppressed museum wages and set a precedent for what workers can expect, and demand, to earn moving forward. While paid internships are not new, we have seen an increased advocacy for and, finally, normalization of paid internships in recent years. NACE—the leading voice for students and graduates seeking gainful employment—has vocally opposed unpaid internships, stating that “unpaid internships are a barrier to achieving equity and opportunity for all college students.”2 However, many still end up in unpaid internships to meet degree requirements or the three to five years of experience listed on even entry-level job descriptions in the museum and cultural heritage sector.
In recent years, the demand for paid internships has only grown louder and the need for them is more critical than ever. In NACE’s 2022 student survey for four-year college students, interns in paid placements averaged 1.6 job offers, in comparison to 0.94 offers for unpaid interns. Students with no internships received an average of 0.77 offers. In the same survey, NACE found that paid interns earned a median starting salary of $62,000 compared to unpaid interns who received a median of $42,500, noting that the salary disparity between paid internship alumni vs. unpaid internship alumni was apparent from the early-career days and typically only grew over time.3 In the 2023 Museums Moving Forward Report on Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums, one of the most discussed findings was that 68% of museum workers were considering leaving the field and low pay was the top reason. It’s clear that the issues we face as a sector around low wages begins with our interns and trainees.
One of my favorite components to the internship programs I have developed is inviting the museum community to share their experiences in the field—and for some, since leaving the field—with a new cohort. One colleague watched interns’ jaws drop as she moved through slides of the wages she was paid entering the museum field and how her salary increased (or didn’t) as she moved up and then out of the sector. “How could you live on $28,000 in New York City?” one intern asked during the Q&A, and she laughed, saying, “I honestly don’t know how I did it.” She and I can laugh about it now, but our shared experience is still true today for current early-career professionals. The ongoing existence of low entry-level wages reflects the still largely unquestioned expectations our field has about working unpaid or underpaid internships before accepting poorly paid positions. Those that persevere might eventually find their way into a role with actual living wages. This is discouraging at best and detrimental to the future of the field at its worst. As a sector, we must collectively commit to a core value of investment in museum workers at all levels of the sector, and that care should start with our interns.
A Call to Care
Despite many decades of advocacy and community-led efforts, I am witnessing a regression of many of these hard-fought improvements. While advancements like increased salary transparency and more paid internships are positive developments, limited job availability, low wages amidst a looming recession, and dwindling funding threaten the sustainability of our field. While not every concern is one that we have control over, caring for one another, especially for our interns and others interested in joining the field, is within our control. That care includes addressing low wages for entry-level workers and ending the practice of unpaid internships. If we are seriously committed to training and mentoring interns to join this field, they should be able to find roles that pay a wage reflective of their experience and education. As I write this in spring 2025, I have noticed the once resounding calls to discuss the future of museums are much quieter than in years past. Even as an established museum professional, I fear what the future may look like without an investment in our interns. That future would likely include a return to museum work being limited to only those who can afford a steep financial sacrifice, limiting the diversity of voices and perspectives maintaining our collective human culture.
So, what do we do from here? In the past, I had a pithy set of responses around finding funding, building partnerships with external organizations, and developing paid internship programs. These days, however, I find myself thinking about the moments I was most inspired by the museum field during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As early as mid-March 2020, many internship programs were canceled. There were no deferred placements or offers to go virtual—just cancellations. Students were rightfully panicked about how these changes might affect their ability to finish their degrees and wondered if there would even be jobs for them if they did.
Those of us involved in internship supervision and programming were able to share opportunities and find additional support because of a focus on community-created resources during that moment of crisis. Professional organizations provided free or heavily discounted webinars and forums for folks to crowdsource solutions to pivoting programming and community engagement online. Some conferences were converted to virtual formats, such as Museum Computer Network (MCN) and MuseumNext, and utilized video conferencing applications, messaging forums like Slack and Discord, and other free or low-cost ways to create community. Museum Workers Speak, a volunteer- and worker-led initiative, developed a mutual aid fund that dispersed over $100,000 to underfunded or laid off museum workers in $500 increments from March 2020 to September 2024. Online community hours were organized so that people could work together remotely. This provided an opportunity to have face-to-face, albeit virtual, connections with colleagues outside of one’s immediate contacts. This moment highlighted the potential impact of community care. The rising tide of mutual aid stoked the urgency and importance for me as an internship supervisor to look beyond my institution to extend resources, support, and solidarity to as many interns and colleagues across the country as possible. Regardless of institutional affiliations, the future of museums is a future that ties us all together. Our strength lies in the collective: sustaining our museums through networks of colleagues collaborating, conversing, conserving, creating, and growing together.
It is community-driven care that will sustain the future of museums. We must come together to ensure our interns are at the core of how we envision the future of museums. I do this work because others have done it for me. I would not be here, doing the work I feel fortunate to do, without other museum workers who supported me as an intern, early-career professional, and even now, in my mid-career. Regardless of your role or years of experience in the field, I invite you to reflect on how you have been supporting early-career professionals, what support you received to get you to where you are now, and how you can leave the field better off than when you first arrived. For me, this means:
taking that informational interview with an interested intern or early-career professional even if you think you don’t have time;
bringing an intern with you to a conference or a meeting of a professional organization you are a part of to give them an opportunity to learn more about the field;
saying yes to the internship program when they ask you to speak to the interns about your career journey (please say yes!);
answering surveys to provide salient data points to help guide the field;
advocating for and supporting the work for paid internships at your museum;
mentoring an intern during the year as much as your capacity allows;
making time to connect with an intern or new entry-level colleague for lunch or coffee;
contributing to an early career or student scholarship at conferences you frequent;
encouraging emerging museum professionals to apply for those scholarships and sharing information about them with your museum’s internship supervisor so it can be disseminated to the interns;
advocating for future job descriptions that do not require advanced degrees (unless truly necessary) and clearly share the salary and compensation for the role.
And so much more. Internships are our collective investment in the future of museums. It is up to all of us to protect and ensure that future.
Endnotes
[1] Stephen Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 229–58.
[2] “Unpaid Internships and The Need for Federal Action,” NACE, April 16, 2025, https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/advocacy/position-statements/6bcb7e07-b277-41a2-bc09-1bca8c2bfd58.
[3] “Unpaid Internships and the Need for Federal Action.”