Experience Heritage is excited to welcome Owen Burton to the team throughout June as our digital marketing intern! Partnering with the University of York and Santander Universities SME Internship Programme, we are lucky to be able to access the amazing talent emerging from the U of Y and we are excited to be a part of Owen’s career journey. We asked Owen a few quick questions about him and his project.
What are you doing at Experience Heritage?
My role is to help Experience Heritage develop their ongoing marketing campaign during their second year in business. This one-month placement involves building their social media profile and helping them communicate their niche in the digital heritage world as a company that combines the latest techniques in 3D digital modelling, mobile app development and mixed reality technologies with knowledge of archaeology from a research perspective. I’m looking forward to helping kick-start a monthly newsletter, creating videos about the company and posting regularly as the company continues to move forward!
Tell us about your background
I’ve just completed a PhD all about Finnish music, so this placement is definitely something new and challenging, but I’ve always loved heritage sites and museums. I was able to combine my passions for music and heritage back in 2018 when I had the opportunity to complete a project with the National Trust at Lyme Park all about the social musical history of the house. I have also worked with arts and music organisations in North Wales where I really enjoyed engaging people in the world of classical music and I look forward to doing the same with digital heritage.
How did this internship come about?
This internship is part of the Student Internship Bureau which sees collaboration between the University of York and job sectors in Yorkshire for project-based placements. Having just finished my PhD, this was a great opportunity to gain more experience of a public-facing role, the heritage sector as well as working within a small team.
What’s it like starting an internship remotely?
Another reason I applied for this placement was to gain more experience of working in an office and a small team. Having spent the last three-and-a-half years doing a PhD, working remotely and in isolation is something I’m pretty familiar with! In that sense, starting to work for Experience Heritage from home hasn’t been too difficult to adjust to and, like everyone else at the moment, contact with team members has just moved online. But it’s been exciting to see how resilient the heritage sector has been over the past few months with COVID-19 and I’m looking forward to exploring how the digital focus of this company can help overcome some of the challenges in the sector as we look to what the heritage world will look like post-“Lockdown”.
What do you do in your spare time?
As a musician, I spend a lot of time playing, writing and listening to music, but I also love getting into the outdoors, walking and visiting heritage sites, so this placement is pretty exciting for me! I also enjoy learning Welsh (having lived there for six years), as well as cycling and cooking.
