Bell Museum highlights unique collections internship program with “Expeditions to the Bell”
CONTACTS
Bell Museum, Nehwoen Luogon-Bojkov, luogo001@umn.edu and Adrienne Wiseman, awiseman@umn.edu, 612-624-0793
WHAT
As part of the Bell Museum’s pilot of an innovative new collections internship program, students and faculty will give a multi-day demonstration of techniques in preparing specimens for the Bell’s scientific collection.
WHEN
Tuesday–Friday, July 6–16, 10am–4pm
WHERE
A tent outside the Bell Museum in our Learning Landscape
TICKETS
Viewing the outdoor activities are free; Normal admission fees apply to enter the Bell Museum.
MEDIA NOTE
A selection of images can be found here, more available as needed
Available for Interviews: Bell curators Sharon Jansa (Mammology) and Sushma Reddy (Ornithology) are coordinating this program, along with graduate and undergraduate students.
MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (6/22/21) – This summer, the Bell Museum has been conducting a pilot internship program, with the goal of expanding hands-on STEM learning opportunities to high school students via a six-week paid summer Research and Collections internship. Students have been recruited from Twin Cities area high schools with a large population from historically underrepresented communities in science and at the museum. This paid internship pairs high school students with Bell Museum science graduate/undergraduate students and curators to work in the museum’s collections and research facility. In addition to their mentoring and internship experience, students would work with the Public Engagement & Science Learning team to build science communication skills that they would utilize through guest speaker appearances in Bell Summer Camps and Bell Live virtual programs.
During the Bell Museum hours on July 6–17, a public component of this internship gives students the opportunity to prepare bird and mammal specimens by simulating an expedition style set up outside the Bell Museum. This program will give students hands-on experience with curation and specimen preparation and offer opportunities to engage with the public to demonstrate how scientific collections are created.
Visitors to natural history museums encounter biodiversity specimens that offer close up views of nature. Their awe is often followed with questions and where and how specimens were obtained. Even more shocking to visitors is that the specimens on display are a small percentage of the holdings of a museum collection. The Bell aims to address some of these questions of why museums have specimens and how they are obtained, preserved, and used.
The research staff of the Bell Museum will stage an expedition setup to show the different steps in the process of specimen preparation and research. Scientists and interns in training will be dissecting bird and mammal specimens for the archives. Visitors will be able to watch live dissections as a team works together to take various data, preserve different types of samples, and produce specimens for the Bell Museum natural history collections, an active research institution utilized by scientists around the world.
Stations will demonstrate bird and mammal specimens, from measuring, cataloguing, preparing, collecting tissue samples, skeletonizing, etc. Visitors will be encouraged to discuss these processes with the students and faculty.
This program has been generously supported by the WEM Foundation.
About the Bell Museum
The Bell Museum is Minnesota’s state natural history museum, founded in 1872. The museum is part of the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences. Our mission is to ignite curiosity and wonder, explore our connections to nature and the universe, and create a better future for our evolving world. For details, visit bellmuseum.umn.edu.