The Bowes Museum Blog

In May, Maraia joined the team at the museum for week of work experience. Here’s everything she got up to!

Day 1

I’ve heard about the museum through my friends and family. I first started to gain interest through my brothers interest in the lego exhibition. I’ve always really liked history and art and hearing that the museum incorporates both really nicely I saw it as a really good place to spend my work experience in. History has always been really interesting for me and to see the museum use both art / culture and fashion to showcase really interested me.  

Day 2

Spotlight talk with Marilyn – really interesting to learn more about Joséphine and John Bowes.  

Walk around with Dean – really cool and fascinating to go around the more unseen parts of the museum to observe and understand how it works. Going on the roof had to be one of my favourite parts.  

Learning about how Faye structures and organises the social media for the museum. I really enjoyed creating historical and fun pieces of content.  

Day 3

We walked through exhibitions with George and Catherine – it was really fun taking apart the Pippa Hale bean bags and looking before, during and post the exhibitions, both of them were very welcoming and friendly. We then started to focus on our speech with Bethan who helped us by giving us some facts and info on our chosen theme / object whilst giving us some tips and tricks on how to stay composed when dealing with the size of crowds etc. Through her help I think we were able to feel more ready and less nervous about our presentation. Finally we ended the day with Dean who showed us around the allotments, giving us a very final briefing about the museum and John Bowes’ initial greenhouse intentions. It was really really fun. We also chose to focus on the architecture and founders of the museum, which we learnt more about with Jane – she was really helpful and seemed very nice to help us with our object.  

Day 4

Today was just some final touches with our speech to get rid of the nervousness whilst also just doing final preparations. We were with Jasmine, and she also helped us with greeting people at the door which was really nice. We also spent some time with Connor and worked with how trails for museums are made and popular aspects of them. Exploring different methods and layouts for this was interesting and also fun.  

Finally we finished the day with Marketing alongside Megan and Sally who were very friendly and informative.  

Day 5

I really enjoyed my work experience here, it was really really fun. I’m so glad we got to experience each team of the museum and how they help. It’s really helped learn about the different career paths available to us and the importance of them. Learning more about The Bowes Museum and its values has really made me more aware, about the importance of them within a workplace and just daily life. It seems work can be really stressful here as there is just so much to be done but I think that everyone has been so nice and helpful to us, I really appreciate it. I can also see that everyone here holds some sort of passion or skill at their job and how well their skill works within a team setting. It’s been so nice to come here and I’m looking forward to utilise and give the skills I gained here to other opportunities in life. Thank you so much.