Internships
The NUS Museum Internship Programme offers opportunities for all undergraduate and graduate students to explore museum careers across its various units. Through this internship, we hope to provide research opportunities, develop professional skills and access to mentorship, while building rapport with students to encourage their interests in the arts and heritage. Internships at the NUS Baba House are also managed through this programme, focusing on studies, programmes and exhibitions around the Straits Chinese culture, and tasks specific to a heritage house. With over ten years of hosting interns from a wide variety of academic backgrounds, our interns have gained valuable experiences with us, going on to take up positions both in the arts as curators, programmers, or academics, and in other non-arts related industries as well.
As the NUS Museum is situated within a flourishing nexus of academic faculty and practitioners from around the region, students gain greater insight into the particular resources and processes inherent to a university museum, and at the same time, learn more about the interests, labour and developments within the local museum and arts industry. While interns will have their own distinct job scopes depending on the position, a combined parallel programme will also be part of the internship schedule. This includes regular field trips to other cultural institutions, networking sessions, and in-house workshops. Several sessions will also be dedicated to a roundtable series which, in the past, has included film screenings and student presentations on topics as varied as the 2019 ICOM (International Council of Museums) Museum Definition, framing oral histories and interviews, and other issues in contemporary museology.
Internship opportunities at NUS Museum for Dec 2020 to Jan 2021 are now available in the areas of curatorial, outreach and collections.
Internships are also offered by NUS Centre For the Arts.
While the Museum’s internship programme is offered only during the major vacation periods, NUS students who are interested in working at a museum are welcome to be part of our team all year round.
As a student assistant, you will work on a paid, part-time basis (subject to various scheduling considerations), working closely with the team to receive and take care of visitors, assisting with event management, guest visits and guided tours.
Available positions will be posted on the NUS Student Work Scheme portal.
Special programmes
Special developmental programmes are offered periodically and are often supported by various partners of the Museum.
Curating Lab
Organised by the Museum and supported by National Arts Council, Curating Lab is a curatorial intensive for aspiring young curators to understand the practice better through exploration of knowledge-production, public symposiums, overseas trips, culminating in an exhibition project.
Writing Lab
This seven-week script writing mentorship programme was facilitated by Huzir Sulaiman of Checkpoint Theatre. In the 2014 iteration, students wrote short plays that drew from or intersected with the Museum’s collections, locating history as a site of multiple reflections and refractions.
MOVE
A four-part writing workshop led by writer Lawrence Ypil, this workshop was as a collaboration between the Museum and the Yale-NUS Writers’ Centre. Running in parallel to Crossings: A Solo Exhibition by Wei Leng Tay, the workshops explored movement in various forms: migratory, diasporic, and the visual poetic.