Join us as we hear from last year’s public history interns! Graduate students in history at BGSU completed internships across the state in 2024. Today, we’ll read about Riley Peterson’s experience working for the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio.

The following reflection was written by Riley Peterson and has been lightly edited.

The National Museum of the Great Lakes is based in Toledo, Ohio, just off Lake Erie along the Maumee River. The SS Col. James Schoonmaker floats in the river immediately adjacent to the museum, a 617-foot-long lake freighter that worked on the Great Lakes for almost seven decades. Seeing how large it was up close and personal is a part of the museum experience, and you can see a glimpse of what life was like on the boat. While I was too far inland to have had any experiences with freighters like this before, it was fascinating to think about what life on the boat would be like long term.

My sons and I wandered inside and enjoyed the exhibits and I tried to decide how to help this museum through an internship and what my experience could offer. Within museums, my main career interest is in education, and watching my children interact with the museums gave me the answer. Understanding from my previous public history class that museums are often underfunded and overworked, I tried to find a niche where I could be helpful and do something that they would want to do, but likely wouldn’t have the employee hours to manage. For my internship, I wanted to analyze children’s learning in museums by surveying the local Toledo-area teachers to determine how their students learned best in a museum environment.

Unfortunately, establishing communication with the group I wanted to survey was a constant hurdle throughout the internship. It took a bit of work and conversation, but eventually, the museum staff and I were able to create the survey that the museum wanted. Museum staff wanted to know best how to attract younger visitors and support them before and after their visits. This internship also stretched me into a new area that I hadn’t considered when designing my internship plan: marketing and advertising. Due to the feedback from the museum staff, the survey morphed to be a bit more of a marketing tactic, and thus, some of my research revolved around marketing.

This internship granted me various skills and clarity about the museum employee
profession. Reading John Falk’s work on how museum visitors look for things that confirm their
various identities was enlightening and prepared me for docent work and to write the survey. It
made museum interactions a bit clearer but also more nuanced and varied. The constant
exposure to visitors allows for quick trial and adjustment when a mistake is made. This process
of teaching, visitor feedback, and analysis helped me realize what went well and what went
poorly and I tried to adjust. An astute teacher can recognize what went well in a class and what
went poorly, and these daily chances to improve are something I enjoy about teaching in the
classroom and something that I enjoy about helping give tours. Drafting the survey also offered
very important insights through my study and conversations with my site supervisor.