Tag Archives: internships

Work experience opportunities at the University of Exeter: An insight into internships and Graduate Business Partnerships

A core aspect of heritage work at the University of Exeter is the creation and development of work opportunities within the university and with external heritage organisations and partners. These opportunities can be invaluable for students seeking to learn skills and gain experience alongside their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. Current Graduate Business Partners Ben and Georgia and heritage intern Eloise tell us about their experiences working within and outside of the university and what they have gained from them.

Becoming Graduate Business Partners:

Since June, Ben and Georgia have been undertaking Graduate Business Partnerships (GBP’s) as Engagement and Campaign Support Officers within the Innovation, Impact and Business (IIB) directorate at the University of Exeter. The Graduate Business Partnership scheme helps recent graduates secure full-time graduate roles, with supportive employers in the South West.

Ben tells us about his experience:

For my GBP role, I provide communications and publicity for the many different research projects and partnerships based in IIB. This involves all sorts activity – from social media, to developing blog posts, to web design. The most exciting thing for me is the scope. IIB is the interface between the university and external organisations, be they charities, NGOs, businesses or the public sector. Because of this, the team in IIB work with academics across all areas of university activity, so the projects I work on are incredibly varied. 

Since starting four months ago, I’ve worked closely with the UNESCO Exeter City of Literature team (a personal favourite as a writer & culture lad), promoted environmentally focused projects (such as EEIST and Green Futures), and supported the university’s strategic partnerships with the Met Office and National Trust. I’ve particularly enjoyed speaking to academics about their work, whether this is ground-breaking research into vaccine passports or community interventions to improve the lives of people living with dementia.

As someone interested in both academic research and creative, editorial work, this role’s been a fantastic, challenging and insightful bridge between the two. I’ve developed a bunch of new skills and experiences (specifically in social media and newsletter engagement, writing and design), but also – by talking to university staff with experience in research, journalism and cultural development – a strong insight as to where I’d most like to work in the future.

An insight into Georgia’s experience as a GBP:

As an Engagement and Campaign Support Officer, I provide communications support for researchers and partners who work with the IIB team. This can be in the form of a blog post or social media content, to event planning or design input. I have recently been working with Ben to create the IIB Year in Review 2020-21, a new campaign that celebrates academic success stories from the past year. Learning about some of the great projects and partnerships which come out of the University has been particularly interesting and insightful.  

Working as a GBP has also allowed me to develop my design skills, primarily via Adobe InDesign. I have been working on ‘The Exeter Entrepreneur’ – a handbook designed to guide people through their entrepreneurial journey, emphasising the key programmes and support that the University of Exeter and SETsquared offers. Additionally, I have created a Press Pack for the Exeter City of Literature group – highlighting the positive impact of the UNESCO title. 

Outside of day-to-day work, the University encourages us to engage with personal development, whether this be developing my skills further or delving deeper into the sections of work that particularly interest me. Within IIB, we also have social hubs that enable local people to meet up and engage with each other out of the office. I found this particularly beneficial when working from home, as the South Devon social hub enabled me to meet co-workers face-to-face in a more informal setting. 

The IIB team have created a well-rounded and supportive environment that has allowed me to further develop my skills and pursue personal areas of interest. Learning about the magnificent projects being researched and developed at the University has been a particular highlight.  

Eloise Speechly: Interning with heritage partner The Charles Causley Trust:

Archaeology graduate and previous Professional Pathways intern Eloise has been undertaking an internship with The Charles Causley Trust throughout summer of 2021. The Charles Causley Trust is an organisation that maintains and raises the profile and appreciation of the work of Cornish-born writer Charles Causley, and has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of Exeter after previous collaboration.

Eloise tells us about her work for the Charles Causley Trust Festival of Arts and Literature:

Over this past summer, I was offered the privileged position to peak behind the scenes at what goes into creating an arts and culture festival, and the difficulties the current pandemic has caused. As an intern at the Charles Causley Trust, I was given unique insight into organising a large-scale cultural festival and gained first-hand experience in undertaking a portion of its administration.

 As an archaeology graduate, I was keen to make my mark and help tackle the mammoth task of creating a fun and interactive festival experience for all the family, in many cases from the comfort of their own home. With my trusty sausage dog Sammie by my side, I was entrusted with coordinating and communicating with acts, performers and artists the festival was featuring, ensuring that time tabling ran smoothly and gave visitors a chance to see as many events as possible.

Though working remotely had its set-backs, with interaction being limited to the video chatting format, I couldn’t have asked for better employers or co-workers. The Causley Trust team made sure I felt welcomed with regular video meetings to check in on how my work was progressing. I cannot express in words how unbelievably enriching both personally and professionally this internship has proven to be long term as I go forward with my career!

To find out more about the work of The Charles Causley Trust, see their website.

For new and returning Exeter students looking for internship and work experience opportunities, check out the Handshake careers platform to keep up to date with current opportunities at both the university and with external organisations. With new roles approved every day, students can select their particular work interests to receive personalised job notifications.

Also see https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/internships/ for more accounts written by students about their work experiences across a variety of degree programmes.

Visiting Cornwall’s Museums the Green Way

Through the Professional Pathways programme at the University of Exeter, intern Nick Collins spent a week in June with Cornwall Museums Partnership…

For many people, working in a museum might sound like a dream job. I was one of those people (and indeed I still am), but in June I was lucky enough to find the only job that is even better – working across several museums, for the wonderful Cornwall Museums Partnership (CMP). My name is Nick Collins and I was with CMP for an all-too-brief secondment from the University of Exeter as part of their Professional Pathways programme. I visited museums and galleries across the county, and below I’m going to share my thoughts on the amazing exhibitions they were running. There’s another theme I’d also like to share. I’ve been trying to show how we can be greener in our museum visits, and help to reduce congestion on Cornwall’s roads, which were as busy as ever this summer. I travelled to all of these exhibitions using nothing more than public transport and my trusty steed (a bicycle, not a horse). But more on that in a moment…

On Monday, I started at Penlee House to see Munnings in Cornwall, an exhibition taking regulars there from the familiar territory of the early Newlyn School into the perhaps less familiar territory of the later Newlyn School, whilst also introducing new visitors to the beauty and humanity of this school of painting. It is that humanity which really shone through in this exhibition – perhaps ironically, given that its principle subject, Alfred Munnings, is best-known for painting horses. But, whatever the paintings show, we have to remember that it was people who made them, and this exhibition told those people’s stories with touching sensitivity. Often, the glimpses we get of artists’ lives are startlingly intimate. Munnings’ painting coat, palette and brushes were there, as were examples of his letters and sketchbooks and his beautiful poem to Jessica Heath. Harold Knight’s portrait of Munnings dominated the entrance to the exhibition, portraying only a few hints of the alleged tension between the two. It is one of three portraits of Munnings, another being a self-deprecating, caricatured self-portrait. Munnings’ contemporaries dominated the next two rooms, with Harold and Laura Knight, Samuel John “Lamorna” Birch, Frank Gascoigne Heath and Charles W. Simpson particularly prominent. They gave us a wonderful insight into the world of the Newlyn School’s less-famous later stages.

Come Tuesday, we made the longest trip of the week, all the way up to Bodmin (yes, by public transport!) to Cornwall’s Regimental Museum. Music was a great morale raiser; the army has known it for centuries – a story told with great insight and originality by CRM’s Citizen Curators, in their exhibition Music, Morale and the Military. There were some fantastic objects, including the D Day dodgers’ banjo, carried by soldiers in Italy in the Second World War in ironic reference to the derogatory nickname forced on them; and a Light Infantry Drum, which tied in very well to the rest of the museum and the superb videos which allowed former members of that regiment to tell its story in their own words. The real highlights, though, were the playable 1920s piano and the new recording of the DCLI Boys Marching Song (a local song probably not heard in almost 100 years), both of which made the exhibition a fantastic place to stay for a while and enjoy the atmosphere. The exhibition was created by the Citizen Curators, a group of five volunteers who put it together over a period of several months. The programme will be running again with new volunteers from October 2019 to April 2020 across several museums in Cornwall. Have a look at this blog post for much more information on that.

The spirit of community curation was alive and well in Falmouth Art Gallery’s exhibition Stuff and Nonsense, which I saw on the Wednesday. There were several pieces of community-curated art, plus the chance for every single person who walked through the door to contribute, with visitors being asked to upload photos of their own “shrines” in response to those created for the exhibition, and also to leave their own found objects alongside those in the exhibition.

The Nonsense half of this exhibition was brilliantly uplifting, featuring illustrations from Quentin Blake, Tony Ross and Edward Lear. There was even a woodblock used in the illustration of Alice in Wonderland, alongside Lewis Carrol’s diary, a real highlight. Several fantastic automata also found their way into the exhibition. The library, housed in the same building, featured more, including an enormous example based on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books.

Uplifting Nonsense

To return to the transport theme, Thursday presented an unusual challenge. Many people would see Portcurno Telegraph Museum as inaccessible by public transport, but there is in fact a bus which stops right outside it. Admittedly, the unusual challenge I mentioned was the fact that said bus broke down in St Buryan on the return journey, but I’m sure that doesn’t happen often… If the owner of St Buryan Caterers, who very kindly gave me a lift back to Penzance, is reading, thanks once again!

The escape stairs from the Second World War bunker at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum

The Telegraph Museum itself is today perhaps more relevant than it’s ever been – as we live through our own communications revolution, it becomes ever more important to understand previous ones. At Porthcurno that story is told not only in terms of the technology (which is covered superbly through working objects and demonstrations) but the people who used and made it, whose lives are shown through their photos and possessions. The highlight is the spectacular Second World War bunker, filled with hundreds of artefacts, many of which are still working. The photo here is the escape stairs, a tunnel leading from the bunker all the way to the surface and beautiful views of the valley.

I finished the week at Royal Cornwall Museum for their exhibition Eye to the Skyexhibition, which told the story of John Couch Adams, who predicted the discovery of Neptune, through Manga. It is an incredible story, and a highly innovative way of telling it. The Manga sat alongside more traditional museum objects, including a large celestial globe and the astonishingly-restored portrait of Adams, which has been transformed from quite literally having a hole in the unfortunate astronomer’s forehead to as good as new. Bringing both of these approaches together created something far better than either style could have achieved alone.

So what did I learn during my week? A lot. More than I can really say. I’ve been lucky enough to work in museums before and if this experience has been an exception it’s because it’s been even better than those other times. Museums tell us stories, entertain us and make us think, but never has it been clearer to me that they can also change lives. From the Citizen Curators who put on such wonderful exhibitions, some of whom have gone on to continued involvement in the heritage sector, to the home-educated children who I saw taking part in a workshop in Falmouth, I have come to understand that museums are about more than probably most people realise. They harness history and the arts as a positive force for the present, and it has been an honour to see how much difference that can make.

I would like to thank the University of Exeter for their part in organising this placement and for the stimulating and enlightening training I took part in. Most of all, I can’t thank the people at CMP and all of the museums in the partnership enough. I hope to see you all again sometime.