Name: Lucia Wang
Class Year: 2022
Major: History of Art
Hometown: Shanghai, China
Internship Organization: San Francisco Asian Art Museum
Job Title: Marketing and Communications Intern
Location: Remote
Award: Emily Seydel Internship Fund
What’s happening at your internship?
Currently, I work as an intern in the marketing and communication department at San Francisco Asian Art Museum (AAM). I primarily work with the creative media producer to edit promotional videos and make simple animations for holiday posts. For the first two weeks, I edited a 40-second promotional video about AAM’s newly exhibited work, Afruz Amighi’s My House, My Tomb. The promotional video is going to be posted on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
As the Fourth of July approaches, I created a firework animation on the print Fireworks at Ryogoku Bridge to celebrate the holiday. AAM has a tradition of posting a firework or festive related Asian artwork on social media platforms every Fourth of July.
My work is not limited to editing videos. I actively work with the whole team to improve the content’s accessibility. For example, we wanted to add some fun facts to the My House, My Tomb’s video, so I watched the live stream of Amighi introducing her work and summarized the content into bullet points. Meanwhile, we emailed Amighi directly to ask about the background story of the work’s creation. Later, we condensed her answers into concise, easy-to-understand phrases that are suitable for a short video. Usually, I post the video link for the whole team to review after I finish my first draft. I draw on their opinions and modify the video. It is common to have five or more versions of one video.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I attended the Praxis fieldwork seminar in the spring semester, and we collaborated with AAM. Both BMC and AAM want to continue this reciprocal relationship and lay a solid foundation for the future, so AAM provided two available summer internship positions. The spring internship is a valuable and meaningful experience for me. My supervisor and colleagues are very inspiring and helpful, and I am willing to continue working in such an inclusive environment. I believe I can further understand the museum career by working full time. Also, my academic training in global Asia and history of art aligns with the position.
What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn’t expect?
My internship is closely related to social media, and I learned some detailed strategies that I never noticed before. For example, as a platform dominated by short videos, Instagram usually requires an enticing hook for the first 3-5 seconds to get people to watch the full video. For videos posted on YouTube, I use the regular title. But for Instagram videos, I will add titles such as "4 fun facts about XXX" to attract audiences who scroll down the page quickly. In addition, the texts need to be placed within an 8:10 portrait frame because viewers won't be able to see any text that's placed at the very top or bottom if they don't stop browsing and clicking on the video. Also, I can’t place the texts near the edge because the like and share button will block them. Although these are very trivial things, we must make sure the viewing experience is comfortable and ideal. Otherwise, the viewers will not be interested in reading the content.
Can you give us three adjectives and three nouns that describe your internship experience?
- Unexpected/Thoughtful/Cooperative
- Patience/Communication/Accessibility
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.