Visitors to the Government Museum in Egmore might soon see student volunteers in colourful t-shirts, badges and caps, explaining about the various artefacts at the Museum, if a proposal of the Museum administration to provide internships to students of Arts courses takes concrete shape.
With school students already being brought to the Museum for educational tours and another plan to bring students from slum tenements to the Museum for such tours set to kick off on February 29, the Museum administration is now speaking to various colleges to provide internships to Arts students.
“We are planning to enter into Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with educational institutions and colleges to send students interested in the various departments at the Museum as volunteers. Science students go to IT companies for internships, for history students the museum will be their lab,” a senior official said.
According to the official, students who are interested will be given an internship for 10-15 days at the Museum. “We have different departments -- arts, history, botany biology, anthropology... Our curators will teach them practicals and then we will provide them with a cap, t-shirt, badges,” the official said.
These students who are trained by the curators will then interact with the school students who visit the Museum and explain to them about the various galleries and facets of the Museum. The official reasoned that since the age gap between the college students and the school students will be minimum, it would ease the interaction, would help them interact well and possibly make an impact on the schools students’ understanding of the museum.
A couple of colleges have already evinced interest, the official said adding that they were waiting for the examinations to be over before formalising the MoUs.
