Michael Robb

College Park Aviation Museum

During the summer of 2012, I served as an intern at the College Park Aviation Museum in College Park, Maryland. The museum is located on the grounds of Historic College Park Airport, where the Wright brothers came to teach the first army aviators how to fly.  The museum’s mission is to interpret and research the history of College Park Airport and aviation in general through the first thirty odd years of aviation history.  The museum accomplishes this through exhibits, collections, and interpretive programs.

My job at the museum involved a wide variety of duties.  My primary task as an educator at the museum is to teach and give interpretive tours.  I also served as a producer for the Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project, and developed an art education program called “Aviation Meets Art.”  This involved researching and writing curriculum, as well as writing grant applications for funding. Additionally, I helped with cataloguing the library and archive collections into the Past Perfect database.  I also handled a variety of administrative tasks.  The educational value of this internship was the exposure to the wide variety of tasks involved and skills that are requisite in the operation of a small to mid-sized museum which often operate on limited budgets and need people with a broad skillset.