Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Li Yixuan

Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Besides working hard and fast in their cubicles, our interns have travelled to Bandung and Malacca, organised symposiums, waded through tons of historical research and pitched in during exhibition installations. At NUS Museum, each internship is as different from the last. If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information!

For the month of January, we will be publishing a special edition of Diary of an NUS Museum Intern. The museum is currently hosting 5 interns as part of Temasek Junior College's WOW! 2012 Attachment Programme where the students are given the opportunity to engage in real world situations and to provide insights or solutions. Each week, each student will take it in turns to blog about their experience and give us a little glimpse into their world.

This week, Li Yixuan shares with us her experience of her time at the Museum.

It was the third week of our internship, and it was really a fulfilled and cheerful week. We have completed the project of creating educational worksheets for both primary school students and secondary school students, based on the exhibition just installed FamilyIntimacies. The exhibition has been installed since last week. The opening ceremony of the exhibition was on this Thursday, 19^th January. Based on the installation and a closer look at those photographs in the exhibition, we were more familiar and more confident to edit and perfect the educational worksheets. When we visited the installation of Family Intimacies, we felt that it was really a difficult project to trace the entire family of such a huge size one. However, through this project, the family was able to find back their connections and the small branches of the huge global family would able to tie together again. This photograph project was a meaningful one, which made us think about our own family, and pay more attention to build up and maintain the kinship.

Meanwhile, we were still trying to create our prototype of the self-guided itinerary of the exhibition Campingand Tramping. Creating a prototype of the self-guided itinerary was much harder than we thought it would be. It took more than one week for us to find out a way to make the prototype efficiently and economically. Although we have decided the form of the itinerary and have completed the descriptions for exhibition items, using photoshop to make the pictures and the descriptions fit into the circular shape of the itinerary was the most challenging part for us since we were not very good at this technology. After Michelle gave us some advices, we went online and researched about the skills to use photoshop. We were still very confused though, and we decided to ask our peers good at photoshop. Our friend Le Yan taught some skills to us, and we finally got some clues to figure out the problem. We believed that we could finish the itinerary by next week. The prototype seemed desperate to us, but we believed that challenges allowed us to make progress and fulfilment. It was worth working along.

We went back to our school TJC on Friday for discussion and confirmation with our teacher mentor Ms Cai Yi Tian in TJ. We have confirmed with her about the dates and location for the Moving Museum in TJC. We put our minds at rest for this project as we could make sure there would be no rush and incapability of implementation of the Moving Museum project.

Till now, we have followed our initial planning of the 4 projects we were assigned to at the beginning of our internship. We even achieved more than we expected since we progressed ahead. This made us learn that planning was really an important thing to do before we focused on doing certain project, especially when there were several projects going on at the same time. Thanks to Michelle for advising us to make timelines for every project, hence we could work in an orderly way.

There is only 5 days left of our internship program here at NUS museum, we hope that the last few days would be meaningful and fruitful as the half of the month passed. The experience we had in NUS museum would be very helpful and unforgettable in our future life!