Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Ng Ling Shan (TJC)

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.

Ng Ling Shan kicks off this special mini-series with her impressions of her first week on the job.

It’s been a week since my team of 5: Vanessa, Yee ling, Shihe, Yixuan and I first stepped into the NUS Museum to start our attachment with the museum and I haven’t looked back at my decision since.  It was really lucky for us to have been able to get into this attachment.  The experience which I’ve gained and the things which I’ve learnt from being attached to the NUS Museum has been tremendous.

Although it has only been a week, we are already in the midst of 2 of the projects which have been assigned to us and it’s been really enjoyable working and planning with my team.  Although all of us were not that familiar with the NUS Museum, the past one week there has changed a lot for us.  We learnt a lot about the museum and also had a chance to understand the different exhibitions and share our interpretations with each other, which has allowed us to bond and to get to know each other better.

I’ve always been interested in museums and just the word "museum" would automatically interest me. Hence, being attached to the NUS Museum is a really wonderful experience for me.  Although we will not be there for long, I am sure that within the one month which we will be at the museum, we will definitely gain some life skills which will benefit us in the future as well as really memorable experiences which we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Over the first week, we have been working on two of our projects, the first a project with the end product being bringing The Moving Museum travelling exhibition from NUS Museum to TJC.  Over the past 5 days, we managed to plan out the 5Ws and 1H regarding the exhibition and we also decided that we would try to sell the museum's merchandise to our schoolmates. We have also been brainstorming on how to get everyone who passes by the area to really take a look at the exhibition and the ideas which we have brainstormed are quite promising!

The second project which we have been working on is to make a self-guided itinerary programme for secondary school/junior college students and we have also proceeded fairly well on that project in the past week, coming up with the main design, the displays and the descriptions of the displays.  I am sure the itinerary would turn out quite well after it has been made and I’m looking forward to seeing the end product myself!

It has been a really delightful as well as eventful first week at the museum!  Within this short period of time, I’ve already gained much knowledge of not just the museum itself but also life skills and experiences of working with others which will definitely benefit me and my friends in the future.  It’s really been a privilege for us to be able to be attached to NUS Museum and I’m sure the next few weeks to come would be as rewarding as the first week has been for us!