By Anna Hsu, Co-Editor-in-Chief
As a junior, I spend my free time worrying about my life outside of the Bryn Mawr bubble. To some extent, college has allowed me to preserve a way of life revolving around learning—my waking hours consist of papers, quizzes, assignments and emails. I imagine my transition to a simple office job will simply be to a life of grants, reports, business calls and…more emails. But there are many possibilities for continuing education outside of college without necessarily pursuing graduate school.
Kai McGinn is a devout Christian and recent Bryn Mawr alumna. She graduated with a major in Growth and Structure of Cities and a minor in Japanese this past December, and has since landed a highly selective internship position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has since moved to Boston and currently serves as an early education aide at Mission Grammar School through Notre Dame Mission Volunteers (AmeriCorps), as well as working as an intern for the Met. She is an avid tea drinker—she takes sips from a cup of black tea flavored with milk and honey as we speak.
McGinn is currently working at the Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library as a part of the spring 2021 cohort of Adrienne Arsht interns. Arsht, a successful business leader and impact philanthropist, donated $5 million to the museum just last August for the purpose of securing fully paid undergraduate and graduate internships. Throughout the 10-week program, interns will work in more than 40 department areas throughout the museum, including “administration, curat[ion], conservation, and education.”
Thanks to Arsht’s donation, the Met received a record number of applications for the spring 2021 program, a 200% increase over the previous year. In total, the spring 2021 cohort includes 28 Adrienne Arsht Interns, as well as an additional nine positions that are funded by other supporters of the museum. The incoming interns reflect a diverse range of backgrounds, fields of study, and areas of interest. Members of the cohort, consisting of both undergraduate and graduate students, come from prestigious colleges like John Hopkins, University of Chicago, Columbia, Yale, University of Michigan, Brown, Williams, New York University, and Harvard.
McGinn is not one to sing her own praises, so I only learned about the news from Nicholas and Lence Communications, a public relations firm that reached out to me with information about her acceptance. While her schedule was packed, she happily set aside time to explain the process behind applying and working at the Met.
“The application was done in a night, and a shift at Carpenter,” McGinn confessed. “I had no idea what this was, other than the fact that I had always dreamed of working with the Met, and they happened to have an especially enriching internship program. It was only afterwards that I learned how prestigious it was. I was still figuring out what to do with the semester after I graduated. And with COVID, I had no idea what doors would be open.”
But McGinn had not originally expected to work at the Watson Library. “I was still thinking about architecture, so I applied to exhibition design. I didn’t attempt the library internship because it was my understanding that they only took students currently in a library school. But after I submitted everything, Holly Phillips, the associate manager of Special Collections and Collection Development at the Watson, kindly reached out to me and allowed me to have an interview with her. And that’s how I ended up working at Watson.”
As a Collections Development intern, McGinn selects rare books to purchase for library collection, researches and contacts international galleries to develop a contemporary catalog collection, and assists collection expansion projects on underrepresented minorities. “I’m definitely learning a lot,” she said. “I used to do circulation in Carpenter Library (of Bryn Mawr), but there are many different parts to a library, like tech, systems, book conservation, and education and outreach.”
One of her current projects is an exhibit focusing on African American artists, which was started in response to the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer and has continued since. She has started an inventory on African-American art and artist representation to see what the library has in its collections. “It’s a big organizational project,” said McGinn. “We’ve added a lot more artists and ordered a lot more books and exhibit brochures of Black artists.” In a separate project called the Judiaca project, McGinn is helping enhance the collection on artists directly impacted by the Holocaust. Yet another project is one focusing on acquisitioning catalogs from contemporary art galleries around the world the Contemporary Catalogs Project. “We’ve reached out to different galleries in New York, as well as some in Tokyo, Kyoto and hopefully some in the Scandinavia region,” she explained.
While the job is challenging, McGinn remains grateful for the opportunity to work with the Watson Library. “I love books,” she said. “Carpenter Library was honestly one of the highlights of being at Bryn Mawr.” Plus, her time with Bryn Mawr’s librarians solidified her interest in the field. “The amount of help and support I got from Laura [Surtees] literally carried me through my undergraduate career,” she said. “As a librarian, you get to learn new things every day, and help other people learn those things as well. And they’re just down-to-earth and easy to talk to. When you’re speaking with a professor, the ‘PhD’ label gets in the way of communicating person-to-person. But even though librarians have all those qualifications, they’re not as intimidating.”
COVID-19 has impacted many aspects of the internship, however. “This is the first time it’s [entirely] virtual from the beginning,” McGinn stated. “It’s fortunate, because otherwise I would have had to turn down the offer.” Still, she wishes that she had been able to have an in-person experience. “I don’t even know what the Watson Library looks like. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to go down to New York and see what it looks like.” The virtual aspect of the internship has also impacted the quality of the relationships among the cohort members. “Even though I have weekly meetings with my cohort over Zoom and get to hear different speakers and guests from different departments of the museum, it’s not as close-knit as it would be in person,” McGinn explained.
McGinn ultimately attributes her success to her faith. “Through GCC [Grace Covenant Church at Bryn Mawr], I met people who are intentional with what they want to do. Having the group community motivated me to take chances. They helped me grow in confidence and pushed me to pursue what I want to do.” There were times, McGinn admitted, when plans fell through for her. “In those moments you sometimes ask God, ‘what are you doing? Why?’ But of course there’s so much more He’s planned out for you.”
McGinn described her previous experience as a Hanna Holborn Gray Fellow as similarly crucial to her success. “It made me use the library so much. In the cohort meetings, you have to meet with your subject librarian and learn how to find sources, and having them force us to do that really helped. You learn how to navigate digital research sources, like JSTOR, Oxford Indexes and use Zotero to keep track of them.” It also helped her application. “I submitted my work from Hanna Holborn Gray in my writing piece, and I think it added more substance to my application.”
When asked about her future plans, McGinn shared that “I just want to deal with books and go into library sciences. I was contemplating on going for education if architecture didn’t work out, but library sciences makes a lot of sense for me.” When I asked further about whether she would want to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, McGinn exclaimed, “It would be a dream to work at the Met!” But she feels she wants to be pragmatic about her prospects. “Ideally, I’d be able to find a more lasting position, find a way to a master’s program, and then essentially become Laura Surtees,” she laughed. “Some kind of librarian at a university, or research library, or museum. It’s becoming more solid through this experience, that this could potentially be a future for me.”
Interview with Adrienne Arsht
I had a chance to interview Adrienne Arsht herself over the phone. As I did more research on Arsht to prepare, I became gradually more awed by her achievements. Although her life was not free of privilege as a white woman in a college-educated family, she still had to struggle with gender inequality and ostracization due to her religion (Judaism). What impressed me most was her willingness to listen and desire to help those who were in need, particularly individuals whose voices are not as easily heard. And she isn’t shy about her achievements—she wants more female philanthropists to put their names on contributions to show what matters to them.
I was obviously quite nervous speaking to Arsht, having only really conducted interviews with friends. I’d prepared an extensive list of questions (and even planned out a greeting) beforehand, but the moment I heard her voice on the line, I panicked and blurted out a timid “hello!”. But Adrienne gracefully swooped in to save the conversation by greeting me heartily, asking where I was from and then emphatically declaring, “So what do you want to ask me about?” Her tone, straightforward and bold, seemed to convey the message: ‘I don’t mince words. Let’s get to it.’
So I started by asking Arsht about her experience at Mt. Holyoke, one of the Seven Sisters. (Her younger sister, Alison, was also an alumna of Bryn Mawr College.) “Mt. Holyoke was the only school among the Seven Sisters that would accept me without a high school degree,” said Arsht. “I’d taken every course that was available at the end of 11th grade at private school; I applied to college at my mother’s suggestion. It was a good education, but everything in life has its influences.”
Arsht’s goal in donating was to change the standard for what is perceived as acceptable. She is vehemently against the idea of unpaid interns. “Internships are a first step in so many fields,” she said. “It provides somebody with an overview of an industry.” Yet Arsht was disappointed at the amount of people who didn’t apply to internships they were qualified for simply because they didn’t have the means to support themselves. “We want people who want to be in that field,” said Arsht, “not just the same types of people who have the means to apply.”
Arsht has been tirelessly outspoken in her advocacy for paid internships, and slowly but surely, the practice is becoming a trend. A CUNY (City University of New York) article written in collaboration with Arsht outlines the ripples that her impact has made on the status quo. Since her donation, a well-known Broadway talent agency has adopted the policy of fully funding their internships. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said they would no longer allow for Oscar film submissions if they hadn’t paid their interns who worked on the film.
Arsht was particularly interested in the Met, not only because she had worked with them on a variety of projects before, but because it had stated its commitment to diversifying its workforce. Paying interns was one of the Museum’s top priorities, and Arsht immediately seized the chance to donate. “Last year, before the donation, there were only about 300 applications. And this year, there were 1000 applications because they were able to be paid. More than 600 people that would never even have been able to consider having this kind of an internship now can, because we’ve broken down this [financial] barrier.”
But Arsht doesn’t think money is the only way to help people in need. “There are so many other ways to be a philanthropist. Writing a check is one way, sure, but I think taking care of others, helping them, volunteering your time—there are so many things that one can do to make a huge difference to people. And you don’t necessarily have to sacrifice your standard of living [by giving up money].” However, she noted, “Money is not a small part. I’m blessed that I have this money; I didn’t always have this money.”
Arsht knows firsthand what it’s like to pass up on opportunities for financial reasons. Her father studied at Penn Law School and was eligible to be on the [University of Pennsylvania] Law Review. However, he didn’t have the financial means to pay for his tuition. “So he had to give up being on the Law Review, which is a huge first step for law careers. He couldn’t take the position because he had to commute back to Delaware for a job. Just imagine, my father, a brilliant student, being eligible for the Law Review, the most prestigious element for being in law school and gets you into the best law firms for employment. And he had to turn that down.”
Arsht was inspired to help expand diversity by her involvement with Latin American and Brazil-American relations. She described her motivations for helping less affluent and underrepresented communities: “Diversity is important in all environments. When I grew up in Delaware, I was part of a minority community from a religious standpoint (Jewish); when I came to Miami, I became so aware of how the Hispanic population, a vital force, still gets left out. My world here was exclusively Cuban American: my friends, my clients. I felt it was important they have mainstream opportunities. So this [donating] became a very good way to act on something that I believed in, and experienced in living there.”
When asked about what her current projects were, Arsht explains that she is currently working on a project focused on the theme of ‘resilience.’ “I just got the autobiography of Tammy Duckworth, Every Day Is A Gift. I don’t want to put it down. She demonstrates resilience in so many ways. Her father was an American soldier, her mother was Chinese, and she was raised in Thailand. All her experiences of being ‘the other,’ being ‘different,’ point to her experiences of resilience and migration. When people flee poverty, corruption, and violence, what makes them so resilient that they would cross borders and deserts to arrive at places where they don’t even know the language? How do they get the strength to make better lives for themselves? What motivates them?”
Which explains Arsht’s motivation for providing the means to help those resilient individuals. “The question is, who’s going to help them take that first step?”
On Diversity
McGinn echoed Arsht’s concerns about the diversity of people who are selected for prestigious internships and jobs. “The [Met’s] application said they were looking for people representative of minority groups,” said McGinn (she is half-Japanese). “In a museum, the ways that artifacts are [presented] are from a single person’s voice and perspective. It’s important that the voice telling the story, organizing the exhibit, and making the collections aren’t one and the same.”
She also reflected on her own experience at Bryn Mawr. “Higher academia tends to be filled with people who have privilege and means,” said McGinn. “It’s already so hard for hiring to happen for people of color or minority groups, so I’m really grateful to [Arsht] for opening up these opportunities.”
As I look to life beyond the Bryn Mawr bubble, I’m reminded that genuinely kind-hearted people like Arsht are working tirelessly to clear the path for future generations. But opportunities that may stem from philanthropic efforts will not simply drift into my lap. McGinn’s story equally reminds us that individual hard work is still critical in order to seize these opportunities. So, as I finish typing up my draft, I make a mental note to send an email to the reference librarians to see if I can schedule a chat.
Image credit: Bryn Mawr College; The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2); Charles Parker; Arsht Center; Peter Kuper/Atlantic Council
