Summer Centered: Miles Lee ’18 Indulges His Love for Art

This summer is the second that religion major and Japanese minor Miles Lee ’18 will spend on the front lines of the Philadelphia art scene, thanks to funding from the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities. Two years ago, he interned at the Asian Arts Initiative (AAI); now, he’s interning at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA).

"I am excited to learn about new things, meet new people, grow my network,” Lee says. “Thinking about how I want to approach the future is probably also one of my main objectives.”

While he sees this internship primarily as a “really good stepping stone into the working world,” Lee is also excited to be in close proximity to some of the greatest masterpieces of the modern era.

"I interned at AAI and I’m interning here because I like art,” Lee says. “I like museums because I like art and they are a great source of inspiration for me.”

Despite that passion for art, Lee doesn’t have curatorial aspirations. Rather than working with the exhibits themselves, he’s interning in PMA's technology department, where he is responsible for cutting shots together and tweaking sound quality for some of the museum’s internal-use videos.

"So far, I have been doing a lot of troubleshooting room audio, editing audio/video in [the video-editing programs] Premiere and Audition, and I have also been helping out with live audio,” Lee says. “Twice a week, I meet with all the other summer interns and we attend presentations from staff from various positions.”

Though he had similar responsibilities at AAI last year, Lee still feels as though he hasn’t yet perfected the whole process of  “producing materials for the organization that I am working for and helping with event setup and troubleshooting,” as he puts it, especially in a venue as hallowed as the city’s almost 150-year-old art museum. He’s hoping that this internship will change that, and he’s particularly eager to get more work experience in the audiovisual sector along the way.

"I see this internship as providing me with a vision of something I have very limited exposure to,” Lee says. “I’m [looking forward] to gaining new skills through it.”

"Summer Centered” is a series exploring our students’ Center-funded summer work.