Internship at the BMI: Part 2

 The biggest assignment I undertook at the BMI was timing and tracking, a tedious but somehow interesting exercise in data collection. The goal of timing and tracking is straightforward; I was to watch guests as they entered our newest exhibit (Fire and Shadow, the Rise and Fall of Bethlehem Steel, usually referred to as F&S among staff for the sake of brevity), and describe them in as much detail as possible. All information was important; what sort of group was coming through, the approximate ages of each individual, what they were doing, what they were talking about, how long they stayed, and even the routes they took inside the exhibit. Each group represented one data point, and my endgame goal was to get 40 data points in order to have a safe average that could represent the foot traffic in the exhibit. Since the museum is only open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays, this limited my time on the floor to those days, leading me to worry about fulfilling my hour requirements for the internship. Fortunately, I was able to add some time in by transcribing my data onto a Google Sheet document whenever I could.

The process of timing and tracking was easier said than done, due to several reasons. For one, it could get very dull sitting on a bench for several hours of the day waiting for people to stop by and stay for a meaningful amount of time. One of the conclusions I came to was that younger people and families generally aren't interested in the exhibit as much as older people are. This led to many instances of people strolling through the exhibit very quickly, and therefore not being a good data point due to their brevity. Secondly, actually jotting down the data was meticulous work, since it required tracing the approximate path each person in a group took, noting how many times they may have entered or exited, and listening intently to any conversations going on. Additionally, there were days when there were very few visitors or none at all, prolonging the process by another day.

I did enjoy my assignment though, despite all the tedium associated with it. Seeing older visitors to the museum go down memory lane while reading the exhibit was nice to see, as many of them were children during the steel mill's heyday, or even workers in the plant at one point or another. One guest from Pennsylvania held a conversation with me about his father's time at Bethlehem Steel's plant in Bethlehem, PA, and told me the worker culture there was similar to the old plant here in Baltimore based on what he had read. Eventually, the time I spent timing and tracking came to an end, and I was given my final task at the BMI..