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My Placement at The Monastery, by MMU Student Intern Caitlin.

Hello everyone, welcome to this wonderful guest post from our recent intern student Caitlin. We welcome your enquiries and hope it inspires something in you too!

Hi, my name is Caitlin and I am currently a second year, history student at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have been on placement at Gorton Monastery since November 2019, as part of my ‘History in Practice’ topic. ‘History in Practice’ essentially refers to history that is widely accessible to the public and potentially interactive – for example a museum, or in this case Gorton Monastery. Anyway, I thought I would briefly explain for you, what I have been doing at the monastery all this time…

On my first, proper visit to the monastery I was treated to a lovely, in-depth tour of by one of the amazing volunteers here, called Grahame. Honestly, if you have the opportunity to take a tour here, I highly suggest that you jump at the chance! It was a great way to learn about the history of the building in a relaxed, yet immersive way. For the rest of my time at the monastery, I have been working closely with quantitative data regarding you, the visitors; recording definitively how many visitors had joined us here, on what day, as well as for what reason. I have also studied research methods in order to find out what would be the best way to collect the opinions of those who visit – so we know what was positive and maybe even a negative about their visit. Granted, I know this doesn’t sound the most thrilling of activities, however it is rather important for us at the monastery to know.

So, now I have come into my last few weeks her at Gorton Monastery, I have begun to focus on my final project for this topic at university; and for this I have decided to produce a presentation. This presentation will consist of everything I have done, as well as learnt here at the Monastery, plus what I believe could potentially be improved. This will be presented to Emma, the Heritage and Community Impact Manager at Gorton Monastery, who has been my guide through this process, and this means anything that I suggest and Emma likes could possibly be implemented permanently.

I hope you have enjoyed learning about what I have been doing here at Gorton Monastery for all this time; and once again, if you are thinking of visiting, please do! It’s a wonderful and educational day out for anyone, at any age!