A week of work experience

Hi, Sagal, Georgie, Michael, Laila, Marnie and Ty here!

We are students in Year 10 and we’ve been spending the last week on a work experience placement at Bristol Museums. We’re delighted to be given an opportunity to work here and are going to talk about how our week has been so far.

On Monday we were given a tour of the building and even went into the basement which was pretty cool! We got to see stuff that the public don’t normally get to see like Fluffy the elephant skeleton. We also got to see lots of taxidermy animals, which are animals that have died and are then stuffed for presentation.

On Tuesday, we were split into two groups and were given separate tasks to work on. One group had to work on the British wildlife board while the other group worked on the dinosaur board and helped giving some facts on Doris the pliosaur. The team with the dinosaur board had to try and convince visitors to go to the Pliosaurus! exhibit. The British wildlife team talked about endangered animals and certain animal backstories.

On Wednesday we met up at M Shed and had a tour around the Skeletons exhibition, which taught us how to identify genders, age and how the person had died through studying their bones. On display there were lots of really old human skeletons, with really interesting backstories.

Later we were taken to L Shed – the store where hundreds objects are kept – to have a look at some very old items including; model boats, WWII cars which were bombed in the blitz, Penny Farthings, cinema projectors and seats and loads more old and interesting stuff.

Afterwards, we were given a chance to ride a crane and some of us were even given the opportunity to drive it ourselves!

Later that day we were separated into three groups, the first group helped in the shop with cleaning up and restocking, another group worked at the front desk and the third group started writing this blog.

On Thursday we spent the whole morning preparing for ‘speed interviewing’ which is much like ‘speed dating’. We were interviewing people who work for the museum to get more of an insight on what it’s like to work in one.

Altogether we had to interview six people and it was very informative and definitely helped with our understanding of what it’s like to work here.

After the interviews we were split into the same three groups as Wednesday but switched around so we were all working in different areas. Marnie wasn’t in as she was at an open day.

We have all decided that our favourite part was when we got to ride in the crane and drive it, especially Ty! This is because we have never done anything like this before and probably won’t ever do it again.

We all agree that it will feel super weird going back to school next week as there isn’t as much freedom as working at the museum.

Thank you for reading this blog, goodbye! Georgie, Michael, Laila, Ty, Sagal, Marnie.