Internships

Auckland Museum offers a strictly limited number of internships at any one time.

We recognise the importance of internships in enabling students to gain valuable workplace experience and develop industry-specific abilities in a chosen area. Our interns bring diversity and up-to-date knowledge that can be useful to our organisation, and we take our role of providing supervision and mentoring very seriously.

Auckland Museum’s internships are normally project-based in a particular section of the Museum, allowing students to gain an in-depth understanding of the practical application of their field of study. Specific project outcomes and tasks will be negotiated with the internship supervisor. Interns may work in areas such as exhibition content development and interpretation, collection cataloguing, natural sciences or human history research, among others.

These internships are normally unpaid and are available to students undertaking or who have recently completed relevant post-graduate university courses. Potential applicants should be aware that any required accommodation and/or travel costs should be funded by the student, and students from overseas universities need to arrange their own visas. Specific project outcomes and tasks will be negotiated with the internship supervisor.

Internships at Auckland Museum may run from one month to six months, for any number of days per week, depending on the needs of the project and those of the student’s educational institution and assessment requirements. While interns will gain insights into the wider operations of the institution during their time at the museum, internships are not considered to be “work experience”.

Find out more

For general inquiries about Auckland Museum’s internship programme, please contact:

Manager, Volunteer Services
Ros Currie

Contact Volunteer Services

Internship Stories

Internship: Lara Simmons, Exhibitions – March to July 2018

I spent four months as an intern with the Exhibitions team at the Auckland War Memorial Museum as part of my Masters of Museum and Heritage Practices from Victoria University of Wellington. One of my main reasons for pursuing an internship at the Auckland Museum was their reputation for putting on quality in-house designed exhibitions.

Interpreters are visitor advocates within an exhibition who work to ensure the information displayed will be accessible and meaningful to the visitors. A goal during my internship at Auckland Museum was to gain exposure to how interpreters play a role within the Museum. I was particularly keen to experience how they stay involved in the exhibit design process through the later stages of design and production and how they interact with other roles within the exhibit design team.

My experience at the Auckland Museum was closely tied to the development of the exhibition Are We There Yet? Women and Equality in Aotearoa. In addition to my work on that exhibit, I was able to expand my experience to gain exposure to all of the projects that the Auckland Museum exhibitions team are working on. This helped me to gain a better insight into the role of the interpreter within an exhibition and how they fit into the wider museum picture.

Additionally, I was able to improve my knowledge of the visitor experience by thinking more critically about target audiences and audience behaviour, as well as being able to observe visitors in the galleries and exhibitions first hand. Lastly, the daily exposure to being in the workplace of a museum the size of Auckland Museum and the exposure to the various roles and people that reside within the institution has been a very valuable experience for someone just entering the sector.