Exam Review

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Museum work placement

You will hear the Education Officer in a museum giving a talk to school students who are about to start a one-week work placement in the museum. 

Good morning and welcome. We’re really pleased that you’re going to be joining us next week for your work placement. Now, each of you will already have met the member of museum staff assigned to supervise you. In this short talk today I’ll be giving you more general information which will be relevant to all six of you. Your normal working day is nine to five p.m. but on Monday, because it’s your first day, we’d like you to arrive at quarter to nine. Please note, though, that you’ll finish at the usual time.

A lot of you have been asking what you should wear for work. Well, you may have noticed that we’re not exactly a formal institution so you’d really be out of place if you wear smart attire like a suit. If you go out on a trip with us, then we’d like you to wear a museum cap ... it has our logo on and we feel it helps people recognise you. But, on a day-to-day basis in the museum itself we say put on your own casual clothing because you’ll be doing lots of dusty, messy work!

Now, we don’t have an enormous number of rules but work placement is an excellent preparation for the real world of work and we expect you to be very punctual and reliable. If you’re not well or there’s been a hold-up then what we ask you to do is ring the museum receptionist ... he will be in the museum well ahead of opening time and he’ll inform your own personal supervisor in the museum. If you’re away for more than one day, we’ll inform your school tutor . they’ll obviously need to make a note of your absence and follow up if necessary.

But most of all we hope you really enjoy yourselves during the placement. Students say they have a lot of fun, whether it’s working with kids in our art workshops held every Monday or, the most popular, when they go out on our out-reach work to residential homes, recording elderly people’s memories of school days for our oral history project.

So we hope you feel excited by the prospect of starting next week and well prepared. Your personal supervisor will be there to help you with our health and safety requirements when you start next week and your supervisors will also brief you about the background to the museum, summarising all the huge amount of information on our website. In the next couple of days it might be worthwhile if you get hold of evaluations and other notes made by students who’ve worked with us before you can get a lot of pointers from them.

Now before I finish today, I wanted to help you find your way around the museum. When you start next Monday, the first thing you’ll need to do is sign in. Come through the main entrance and you’ll see the main staircase straight ahead. To the right of this is the statue of the horse and just behind that is a door - go through that and that’s the sign-in office. Now, on the first day you’ll be working in Gallery 1. You find this as follows ... in the central courtyard area, close to the entrance, there’s a large chest where visitors put donations for the museum. The door just behind that leads to Gallery 1. The workshop you’ll be taking part in starts at eleven o’clock but if you want to go in earlier you can get the key and let yourself in. The key box is quite hard to find. Walk behind Reception and it’s between the large gallery and the bookshop.

I haven’t mentioned breaks, lunch etc. Unfortunately our cafe’s closed at the moment so your best bet is to bring a packed lunch. We tend to have our sandwiches in the kitchen area ... go round the reception desk and you’ll see a small circular cabinet - the door to the kitchen area is just behind that.

Now everyday, we put up notices about what’s happening in the museum. Your supervisor will brief you but if you want to check up on details, look on our staff noticeboard. This is in the corner of the play area - at the back, on the wall of Gallery 3.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to ...