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Capital Campus Public History Program Department of History, College of Arts & Letters

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Internships

The history department has internships available at the graduate and undergraduate level in museums, archives, cultural resource management, historic sites, teaching, and much more. Internships are an opportunity for you to put your history skills to work in the world and they will help you to build a strong resume.

Community partners across the region and the country mean local, state, federal, commercial, and non-profit opportunities are available to students. Most internships are paid; many pay above the minimum wage. Internships allow students to build a competitive resumé while going to school.

As part of internships, students apply theory from coursework to learn methods and practices in public history fields such as archives, museums, documentaries, and historic sites.

Most of our internships are in the Sacramento area with partners that are dedicated to helping you learn what your history degree can do. You will get hands on experience working with artifacts, documents, and public audiences, all while earning course credit.

Undergraduate internships are an elective in the history major. As a prerequisite, students must have junior standing and a 3.0 GPA. They are 135 hours. Undergraduates also have the option of a teaching internship in the local school systems.

Graduate students must complete three internships, at 135 hours each, during their degree program. Internships are offered Fall, Spring, and Summer semesters.

Internship Sites

Some of our internship sites include:

  • California State Parks
  • California State Railroad Museum
  • Sacramento Public Library
  • Yolo County Museums
  • Placer County Museums and Archives
  • California State Archive
  • California Office of Historic Preservation
  • North Central Information Center
  • Crocker Art Museum
  • JRP Historical Consulting
  • Sacramento State Special Collections and University Archives
  • City of Sacramento Community Development Department
  • Sutter County Museum

Internship Partners Wanted

We are always searching for new opportunities for our students as well as new partners within our community. If you or your institution is interested in working with Sacramento State public historians, please see our Community Partnerships page to see how we work with the community and how you, too, can get involved!

Internship Spotlight

What kinds of things do interns do at their internships? Intern work depends on the site at which you intern and the project that you are working on at that site. In each internship, students work with a practicing public historian with an advanced degree and professional experience in the field to complete a task or project, such as digitizing a collection, planning an exhibit, or documenting and preserving a historic building.

Evan Mackall, California Revealed

Image of historic newspaper out of storage to be digitized and preserved.

"I interned for two semesters at California Revealed, a State Library-funded initiative that digitizes and provides online access for historically significant California archival material- books, newspapers, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and more.

The project also provides technical advice and guidance for partners with in-house digitization programs, in addition to free digitization services.

My internship role as a “Digital Preservation Assistant” is to assist with the print stream workflow, which mainly includes newspaper collections. The print stream workflow consists of several responsibilities for collections of different formats, such as physical newspapers, microfilm, and microfiche. My responsibility is to check in, process, and prepare collections for shipment, as well as perform Quality Control (QC) on newly digitized collections, and upload collections to the California Revealed public website, https://californiarevealed.org/.

I am currently curating California Revealed's first digital exhibit as my thesis project. The exhibit will focus on California Gold Rush-era newspapers and their cultural impact on the supposed racial identities of Anglo and non-Anglo groups."

Tracy Huddleson, Crocker Art Museum

"I’ve enjoyed two internships in educational programming at the Crocker Art Museum. There, I've organized a community festival for the Transcontinental Railroad’s sesquicentennial, and researched the history of New Mexico artist colonies for an upcoming exhibition. I’m not an art history student -- I'm a public history student who appreciates art. That means I bring something different to projects here. I’m learning new skills, too, pulling together potential film series, youth activities, and lectures for public programming. Bonus: being surrounded by magnificent artwork everywhere I look! It's such a gift."

Morgan Braun, Gibson House Museum

"As an intern at the Gibson House, I worked with the curator Iulia Bodeanu to appraise and document items in collection storage. The Gibson House is a historic house museum located in Woodland, California that collects items relevant to Yolo county history between 1830 and 1930.

While the historic property is deeply representative of agricultural history, it has a variety of items in collection storage. This includes things like baby christening gowns, petticoats, shoes, clothing from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, farm equipment, and an odd collection of various medical items. I then submitted photographed items to the museum committee, who voted on whether the item remains in storage or migrates to a new repository. The small museum offers many opportunities to work directly with historical artifacts, historical interpretation, and a local history site."