What It’s Like to Intern at the AMNH

One of my highlights at the Museum is working with talented young people from around the world in graduate programs in NYC (most often NYU’s Digital Media Design for Learning program and Teachers College’s Instructional Technology and Media program). Below is post from Pimnipa Kangsanan, getting her degree from T.C. (and here from Thailand) documenting some of her recent experiences here at the Museum. Enjoy!

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Hi there! My name is Pim. I am currently a graduate student pursuing a Masters degree in Instructional Technology and Media at Teachers College, Columbia University. I work as Lead Intern on Science Visualization Group Prototyping here at American Museum of Natural History.

First things first, I have been a fan of this blog even before I started working with Barry. Isn’t going behind the scenes of this historical museum fascinating? Mooshme was my main inspiration to apply for an internship at AMNH!

Me at My Desk

Since I started my internship here this semester (Spring 2018), I was lucky to have touched on many aspects of the Science Visualization Group. I worked on two education courses (Visualizing Science Youth Team and Finding Flamingo), and an adult-only after hour event. With each project, I got a chance to meet so many interesting, kind, talented people who work here. Let me tell you project by project.

Visualizing Science Youth Team Course – Module 1

This course was a semester-long course offered to high school students. It was comprised of 4 modules; however, I was only the evaluator for the Module 1 (the other 3 modules were evaluated by my co-intern, Wang Xi). The youth signed up for this course as an extracurricular program, so they were self-selected to join the course.

As someone who did not have much extracurricular activities to join growing up, I must say I am really jealous. This course was also not just any science course, and definitely not a cram school courses I used to see high school students go to (back home in Thailand). It was a class that is unique to AMNH, co-taught by educators and scientists who work at the Museum. Students got to visit labs, work with cool specimens (and I am talking about real dinosaur fossils level of coolness), and used real scientific tools that scientists use in their study, like CT scan, Tableau, 3D printing, etc.

What did I do? Oh, I evaluated the course to see if there’s anything we can do to make the course better and to help the Museum better understand how to offer such science visualization-related programming. One of the things I did to find out about that was classroom observation. I sat in the back of the classroom furiously typed everything I saw down to a Google Doc in real time and, at the same time, gauged the atmosphere of the room. Were the students bored? Were they excited? Are they responding? What kind of examples excited them? And I would occasionally take picture when students worked with cool tools, like this one.

Students used a caliper tool to measure skull specimens

We also collected data by posting questions and prompts for youth to answer on Slack, as well as pre and post-surveys (we use these surveys to track their changes and progress before and after the course). After the course ended, we had internal processes to collect data, like interviewing the instructors, curricular analysis, and looking at youth’s project presentations.

After we gathered all this information, we tried to match them with our overarching questions that cut across all four modules.

There was one early finding that came as a complete surprise to me: youth associate Sci Viz with creativity and open-mindedness. Youth gave us their impression of the course by mentioning these two qualities again and again. I’d love to know more about it even after my time here 🙂

One surprise to me was that Sci Viz is a really new field! It is still evolving. So, as we evaluate the course, our meaning and definition of what Sci Viz was developing as well. We had to sit down and talk among our team to define the scope of Sci Viz and what it means to this course. This was so special to me because it makes me feel like I really am in a defining moment of a novel science field. As someone from a humble background, I never thought I could be in this place.

Finding Flamingo Course

This course was unlike Visualizing Science Youth Team in many ways: First, my involvement. In the Finding Flamingo course, I got to participate in every decision-making process, from drafting the overarching question, seeing how the instructors came up with each activity, and choosing evaluation tools. I got to give my input from working with the data with people in higher-up positions. It was such a great opportunity for me.

Second, the course content. This course was specifically about one field of science visualization, Geographic Information System (GIS) and mapping technology. We tied it back to the Museum through how our scientists used GIS to study flamingos and help preserve them. (Long live the pink bird!)

What it means for me to be a part of this course evaluation team was that I got to see how much care and thought was put into making a course happen here at AMNH. One 30-minute activity in a classroom might not look like a lot but it was created with so much knowledge, care, creativity, and energy from many many talented people from education, technology, and scientists from different science domains.

Youth presenting their mini-research on flamingos on the last day of class

Dinos After Dark!

Have you ever dreamed of having a night at the Museum? I have! As someone who grew up with Hollywood movies, I refuse to die without checking this one off my bucket list. Unsurprisingly, so many other adults have this childhood dream too. Dinos After Dark! was a dinosaur-themed adult-only after hour event that was offered by the Museum’s Public Programs department. But more than just attending the event, I got to be one of the Museum’s staff! My part, as the name of my position suggested, was to evaluate visitors’ comment on two of our prototype, 360-videos.

360-video, as many of you might have experienced, is an immersive media which you can physically turn your body around to see the surrounding, unlike normal movies where you can only look one way. At this event, we offered two stories, Visit the office of Mark A. Norell, Paleontology Division Chair, and Visit the Big Bone Room, where the Museum keeps its larger dinosaur fossils collection. We set up a stool and showed visitors a “video menu” (the front side of our evaluation form) and asked visitors to choose which video they’d like to watch. After the visitor watched their first video, we asked if they’d like to watch the second video. As a result, some visitors would watch one video and some would watch both. After they finished watching video(s) of their choice, we invited them to flip their “video menu” and take our survey.

For me, the best part about this project is to see excitement and happiness on visitors’ faces. They were so eager to learn more about dinosaurs and the Museum’s fossil collections. It was just great to see how our prototype made their day special. It would be hard to see this kind of emotion from adults outside of the Museum. It was one of my favorite experience here. I would do it again anytime.

Me at the 360-video station holding the evaluation form/video menu

In short, my experience as an intern here is magical. It was everything I hope to learn, experience, discover, and much more. People I met from this internship is the highlight, though. They inspired me though the things they do and I want to one day do the same thing for younger people, like what they did for me.