The Festival of Museums is a Scotland-wide event which takes place over one weekend in May.  Championed by Museums Galleries Scotland, the national development body for museums in Scotland, it is aimed at promoting inventive and ambitious activities within museums, primarily to engage different audiences.  We have run successful Festival of Museums events for the past two years and have attracted over 1400 visitors.  For these previous events we involved student volunteers and have always benefitted from their support and enthusiasm.

A core team of three staff will be planning the weekend for 2016, but we would like to expand with the provision of a paid student internship.  We plan to offer a fixed term, part-time internship to a University of Edinburgh student who will work with us on our activities and be given the chance to develop their own event. The intern will have a fantastic opportunity to gain experience of working with our collections, planning events and collaborating on a national project.  The intern will also learn the practicalities of event development, management and delivery, publicity and marketing, and maintaining a social media presence.  Working part time over several months will also give our intern the chance to shape our events to offer improved engagement with identified key communities.

The CRC has had much success running full time internships, but offering additional opportunities for students to gain practical experience during term time would enhance our unique proposal.  The prospects offered by hosting this internship would benefit both the intern and our Festival of Museums programme.  The intern will be allocated a small budget to plan, manage and deliver their own event specifically aimed at encouraging student attendance, giving them an extra level of responsibility as they will be targeting one of our key audiences for the weekend.