A Day in the Life of a Work Experience Student at the AGC Museum
On Monday morning, I started off by touring the AGC Museum alongside the Gurkha Museum. Both of these museums were very interesting and full of artefacts and stories as well as key events and people. In the afternoon, I watched as the museum’s staff led a school trip who visited the Royal Green Jackets Museum, the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum, and the Horsepower Museum. Each museum had a different speaker talk in-depth about a key event in their regiments history from the Battle of Waterloo to the Crimean War. Needless to say, I learnt a lot!
The next day, I started off the day by finding information about artefacts I would be putting in a display later in the week and recording this information. This gave me some good insight into what the content of my display would be. I then was tasked with looking through the service record of an officer in the Army Pay Department who served during the First World War and writing up what I could find about his military career. This was really fun as it gave me the chance to understand what people serving at this time might have been doing around specific dates. Finally, I finished off the day by helping label new donations to the museum which is a surprisingly relaxing task.
I began researching for my display’s information sheet on Wednesday which would be on the history of Army Education. I’ll admit I didn’t know too much about this subject beforehand but after all my research I’d say I’m pretty confident in my knowledge on it. The first recorded instance of Army Education was way back in the seventeenth century, however it really started to develop in the 1800s and the early 1900s. Its history carries on all the way to the present day, so there was a lot of information and facts to cover. I spent most of the day working on this, but for the last few hours of my working day, I was able to label more donations.
On Thursday, I finished my display’s information sheet and went back to my list of objects to neaten it up before starting to set up the exhibition. Firstly, I helped to carefully remove the objects from the previous exhibition from the case I would be using. Then, I moved my objects into the case and decided on a nice way to lay them all out, along with the information sheet and object list. I personally think the display turned out really well and I’m glad all my work paid off!
And finally on Friday, I made a poster and an Instagram post for an upcoming event at the museum which I really enjoyed because of the creative freedom I was allowed. This brings us up to now with me writing a blog post about my work experience at the AGC Museum. I have really enjoyed my time here and have picked up some valuable life skills as well as some great facts along the way. It has really been a unique opportunity that would be hard to find anywhere else.
