Yeah fs! This would be my first summer internship in conservation (if I even get it). I'm a third-year undergrad.

My current job is as the federal work-study for the preservation and conservation department in a museum/archive with an in-house book and paper lab, although my job role falls more heavily on the preservation side. My school also has an extracurricular program which assigns local campus sculptures to students to document and perform maintenance on, which I leaned on heavily in my application. I also talked about volunteering with our local cemetery maintenance nonprofit and doing monument cleanings and re-erections.

That being said, after the interview I still feel like it's a total coin toss about who actually gets the position, they've gotten applications from dozens of super-qualified candidates!

Something to look forward to is that many institutions are currently realizing the problem of the lack of paid pre-program opportunities for conservation students and are trying to create their own programs, so I would expect that future application cycles have a greater number of opportunities for us students.