Meet the Interns!

The museum is lucky enough to have three interns helping out around here this summer.  Here’s your chance to get to know them. 

My name is Samantha Weaver, a senior at Ball State University in the history department and I am a lover of museums, a nice cup of tea, and all things historical.  I was introduced to the National Model Aviation Museum and their internship possibilities in a public history course that I took last semester.  The internship at this establishment appealed to me because of all the experiences one can receive in a small museum setting. 
This summer, I will be working on the organization of staff shelves as well as helping to revamp several exhibits within the museum.  I am excited to see the plethora of projects that have been assigned to me come to life, and to learn all I can from this opportunity.

My name is Jenn Collins and I will be interning for 15 weeks this summer at the National Model Aviation Museum.  I am a Delaware County native who was born in Muncie, raised in Albany, and currently reside in Albany with my husband, Frank, and our two children, Isaac and Lili.  I am a Senior at Ball State University, and am majoring in both Public History and English Literature.
My main activity for the summer will be to catalog and properly store and preserve the museum’s American Junior Aircraft Historical Collection, which is a large collection of items related to both Jim Walker and his American Junior Aircraft Company.  I will also try my hand at helping with museum tours and creating web-based educational aids for a few of the museums displays. 

My name is Justin Kersey, and I am interning for the National Model Aviation Museum Archives. I am a senior at Ball State University, majoring in Public History. Having lived in Muncie for the past five years, I knew about the museum, but it was not until one of my public history classes went to the museum to learn what goes on behind the scenes that I became interested in the building.  The next semester, Maria VanVreede and Jackie Shalberg came into the classroom for another one of my public history classes, and mentioned that they had openings for interns every semester.  I used that opportunity to contact Jackie, since the NMAM would prove to be great experience in museum work.  I am still unsure as of right now whether I’d want to work in collections or archives in the future, but this is a great opportunity to familiarize myself with the museum workplace nonetheless.
As an archive intern, my job is to maintain the condition of our documents, as well as organize them in a way that makes research easy for both us and patrons that come in. My largest project so far has been cataloging and sorting the Weber Collection, a collection of hundreds of documents dating back the 1940s, donated by Leroy Weber Jr.  This is not to say, though, that I have not worked on other projects.  I have also been helping Jackie digitalize our Model Aviation magazines, as well as creating web pages with biographies for the new Hall of Fame exhibit that the museum is working on.

Check back at the end of the summer to learn more about the outcome of their projects.