Summer student internships at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum: developing practical skills for students, and strengthening partnership with the University of Regina

The Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum would like to offer a series of summer student internships that bring university students and recent graduates into a museum setting, to gain hands-on experience alongside research scientists and curatorial staff at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. This experience will focus on developing collections across multiple units at the museum, including Archaeology, Ethnology, Palaeontology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Vertebrate Zoology. The internships will cover a wide range of topics that connect the museum to multiple departments at the University of Regina. Each unit will conduct an internship project that focuses on collections at the museum, and getting students to help build these collections through activities such as identification, cataloguing, rehousing, preparing, and collecting in the field. Beyond the focus on training students, these activities will differ from the day-to-day activities of the museum in that the collections involved will largely be targets for future research projects (setting up for collaborations between museum curators and other academic partners or co-supervised graduate students), or the work will address roadblocks that are making the museum collections inaccessible to a wider range of researchers and the public. These training opportunities are important because they provide experience that is not currently available in a university setting, and they prepare students for a wider range of careers. Removing collections roadblocks is important because it allows a wider range of researchers to use the data associated with museum collections, and address research questions relevant to Canada. It also allows these researchers to contribute to collections at the museum, ensuring that their data and research materials are preserved in perpetuity and made freely available to everyone.

Faculty Supervisor:

Maria Velez;Christopher Somers;Ryan McKellar;Christopher Somers;Ryan McKellar;Maria Velez

Student:

Partner:

Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Arts, entertainment and recreation

University:

University of Regina

Program: