Talking about Internships: Jeff Lubinski & the Greer Heritage Museum, South Carolina

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I'm from Tampa, Florida. I attended a high school with a STEM magnet program, where I studied biomedical sciences. There was one history teacher who opened my eyes and made me realize that what he was teaching was more than just a class. Every day he had some story or fun fact to share about the topic we were learning, and sometimes brought in artifacts or interesting items related to his own history. Seeing his passion and involvement in this field was inspiring, and the care he took to make the classroom engaging for every student made me fall in love with the study of history. He talked to me about the potential for doing history as a career. I knew I wanted to go to FSU, because I loved the campus and its history. My dad had gone to FSU too.

I came in as an exploratory major, but between speaking with my professor for American history and visiting Strozier library and seeing all those history books, I fell in love with reading and hearing about history. Now I am a junior, working on a History and Communications double major. I am taking my first public history class this fall, and I am very excited to learn how to relate history to the public, to different audiences, and be the translator of historical knowledge to those around me. 

My favorite kind of history is the history of sailing. I had a book on the history of seafaring in high school that captivated me. Seafaring and how it helped to spread cultures, goods, people, I found that fascinating.

My other main interest is archiving. My internship allowed me to work behind the scenes in a museum, and I learned the ropes on how you relay the information to a broad audience. 

How did you find out about this internship?

During my freshmen year, my family decided to move to South Carolina. As part of exploring their new town, my mother learned about the Greer Heritage Museum and their need for volunteers. I called the director and discussed volunteering and a possible internship. So that’s what I did this past summer. Greer is a small-sized town between Greenville and Spartanburg. It grew because of the railroads; it was incorporated in 1876. The museum aims to tell the story of the town and its inhabitants. It is volunteer-run and located in the original post office of the town which was repurposed to be a museum. A lot of its collections come from the families around Greer. That’s what I got to help with – accessioning new donations.

What did you do during your internship? 

My main task was digitizing and archiving papers. The bulk of what I worked with were the papers of the mayor’s secretary from 1915 and 1923. I added the details on the documents to our online database, and then scanned and uploaded them. If they were written in cursive, I had to transcribe too. I was also in charge of receiving and accessioning new donations. My other chores included welcoming visitors to the museum, and sometimes I gave tours. I was involved in organizing museum events as well. I got a sampler of what it means to be running a small museum.

What sort of training did you get?

In the beginning, the director took a few days to show me the ropes. How to accession documents, how to handle artifacts. He gave me his own tour of the museum so that I understood its history. I did some research on my own to get help with reading cursive and to get more information on time periods and locations.

Trying to decipher cursive was difficult. Often there would be three of us hunching over a piece of paper with a magnifying glass trying to work out the letters and the words. Because all my documents were written by the same person, I became familiar with his style of writing. By the end of the summer, I was relatively fluent in reading his sentences.

What did your daily schedule look like?

I worked in the museum five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. About 20 to 25 people in total helped in the museum. As I stayed every day from opening to closing time, I got to meet all the volunteers who worked only for parts of the day. I quickly realized that because I was there all day long, it fell to me to connect and coordinate people and projects.

I also got to help with organizing special events, like our History and Donuts event. We had 50 to 60 people come to have coffee and donuts and hear a talk by the director on Greer’s history. On a normal day, there would be 10 to 15 visitors in the museum. Because it was a small museum, it gave me the ability to learn and not to worry about mistakes and to take things slowly. It was a great first experience. 

I really liked learning about the preservation aspect of physical objects. I did not realize that the biggest concern is to be able to undo a restoration process, because you never know if there's going to be a new, better method that won’t damage the artifact after years of storage.  

I think working on documents was my favorite activity, because you got so much insight from each one. Some of them talked about how you can fix your boiler, others were precise instructions on the duties of the post office. Reading through the material was fascinating. 

I am hoping to go back and continue with their digitization efforts whether as an intern or a volunteer.

What sort of challenges did you encounter and how did you deal with them?

The first time I gave a tour was very nerve wracking. It was my second or third day, one of the senior volunteers was busy with a tour group, and when more people came, she said: “Jeff, can you give them the tour?” And I had to do it. I stumbled through some parts, got a few names mixed up, but then I corrected myself later. It was a learning process; by the end of the summer, whenever people came in, I could show them around without problems. I enjoyed it; it helped me feel more connected with Greer and South Carolina. That was something I was surprised by the end of the summer: how connected I felt with the town.

What was the most surprising thing that happened during your internship? 

Some of the donations we got. About four to five weeks into my internship, I was just about to eat my lunch, when this lady came in and said: “I have the arm you asked for!” She put a prosthetic arm from 1936 right next to my lunch box. The arm had belonged to her grandfather who worked in one of the local mills. The museum encouraged donations from everybody in the town. While they might not be able to display all artifacts right away, every item helps build out the local story.

What advice would you give to other students who might be thinking of doing an internship at a museum? 

I would say: “Go local.” Working in the local museum helped me connect to the town and the people living there. Even though it dealt with a historical period that I was not so interested in, once I started my internship, I began to relate people I met in the town to material on their families that we held, and I had been writing or researching about.

It made the internship a special experience for me. I think finding local museums or local libraries, organizations that are run by the people around you and record the history of the people around you. Everything I did, I knew I was giving something back to the town and learning about it in return.