Someone has to wax the bronze statues in front of the White House. That was Jessica Yim's job as an architectural conservation intern with the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE) at National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, D.C.
The work
The goal is to keep the monuments and memorials clean and stable, so that both the structures and the people and events they honor are respected by local residents and visitors. Yim worked with the park's preservation crew and the Historic Preservation Training Center across the Mall:
- cleaning graffiti and hot-waxing bronze statues, including that of Brigadier General Thaddeus Kościuszko in Lafayette Square, from an aerial lift;
- masonry work, from repointing the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to resetting bricks in front of the Willard Hotel to remove a tripping hazard;
- reinstalling glass panels at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial;
- helping curators organize the Vietnam War Memorial collection, care for Ford's Theatre and catalog items at the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument.
How she got there
Yim, a Chinese American student from Sacramento, was entering her final year at Scripps College, double-majoring in studio art and in art conservation and heritage science; she also plays taiko, the traditional Japanese drum, and led her college's taiko club. She began in studio art alone, then fell for conservation's mix of disciplines and its contribution to history and community. The summer before, a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship had her working on outdoor sculptures in Los Angeles with a private conservator — hard physical work that showed her how much preserving public art matters to a community, and that a career should be about what it does for society.
Her advice to her younger self: never close any doors. She went from dog grooming to animation to art conservation by following opportunities even when unsure where they led, and expects the path to keep winding.
Internships in cultural resources
Cultural resources — archives, archaeological sites, museum collections, structures, cultural landscapes and places with meaning to the groups traditionally associated with them — are the evidence of what people leave behind. The National Park Service's Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science Directorate places interns and fellows through partners such as the American Conservation Experience and NCPE, on projects from tribal consultation and policy to the stories of women in World War II to connecting communities with public history. More are listed on the NPS Youth Programs page.
Sources
Based on "Intern and Fellow Highlight: Jessica Yim" from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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