Oxford National Trust Partnership Wins Award

14 December 2021
Alice Purkiss and Dr Hanna Smyth
The badge consists of a blue circle with 'the Internship Office' and 'the university of Oxford' written in white letters. A ribbon in gold splits the circle horizontally, reading 'Gold Standard Internship Host' in white letters.

Gold Standard Internship Host Badge, University of Oxford.

The Oxford National Trust Partnership has been awarded a Gold Standard Internship Host Award, after hosting 150 students on micro-internship placements since 2018.

 

Led by Alice Purkiss (NT Partnership Lead) supported by Hanna Smyth (NT Partnership Support Officer), the NT Partnership team has hosted and co-supervised Oxford undergrad, masters, and doctoral students from 20+ departments, on a variety of curatorial and policy research projects commissioned by National Trust staff.

 

The Gold Standard Internship Host designation, awarded by the University of Oxford Careers Service, denotes hosts with more than three years’ hosting experience who have performed highly against the following criteria:

· Overall quality of feedback from interns

· Consistency of internship provision

· Responsiveness to emails from students and the Internship Office, responsiveness to difficulties and to constructive feedback

· Provision of resources for interns.

 

The NT Partnership’s micro-internship research projects are all live projects submitted by National Trust staff, chosen via a competitive internal selection process by the National Trust’s Research Team. Oxford students have conducted micro-internship research relating to National Trust properties across every region of England and Wales. The majority of these micro-internship students have worked on curatorial research projects: investigating everything from the history of bats, Inuit artefacts, and Greek vases to Indian archival sources on Charlecote Park, Black presence at National Trust properties, and class, gender and ‘home’ at Knightshayes. Other students have researched educational, climate change, volunteering, and heritage policy for INTO, the International National Trusts Organisation.

 

The micro-internship exceeded my expectations. I loved the breadth of the project and the amount of freedom within the brief to focus on relevant topics that I found especially interesting. Furthermore, I felt that my work was really valued by the National Trust staff, and working on a live project was exciting, especially learning about how my research would later inform further projects at the property. 

- NT Partnership curatorial research micro-internship student, September 2021

 

Evaluation feedback from micro-internship students hosted by the NT Partnership has been overwhelmingly positive, with for example 93% of curatorial research interns surveyed in the past year stating the experience made them feel ‘quite’ or ‘very’ confident about conducting curatorial research and engaging with historical collections.

Find out more about the National Trust Partnership here.

Find out more about the University of Oxford Heritage Programme here.