My experience as an intern at The Resource Exchange was filled with nothing but excitement and adventures. There was a completely new task for me to do each day. From sorting and untangling literally tons of donated yarn to unpacking bronze figures from Thailand, I learned about the vast amount of work that goes on at The Resource Exchange.  I am still surprised at how much donated or salvaged items there are inside the store. What I enjoyed most while interning here was bringing in donated/salvaged items. I would never know what could be inside a large cardboard box that was salvaged from a film set. I will definitely miss the countless times I asked “What is this?” while unpacking mysterious packages.

Aside from recovering salvaged items, I was able to spend a lot of time learning about the recreating part of the organization. It was very interesting seeing the innovative projects that artists create, such as the faux food. It was also interesting reading the blog about how people used items purchased from The Resource Exchange, like building a kitchen island from scratch.

Each day I was able to spend an hour to work on a project. On the first day of my internship, I decided that I wanted to build a Rube Goldberg machine. This project came to mind after I saw how many unique things there were in the store, especially in the “Weird Room.”
I spent many days collecting the things I needed and sketching out the different parts of the machine. It was hard to tell if the machine would work or not because there wasn’t a space for me to set up and leave the machine at a certain spot until the very last week. In the last couple days of my internship, I was able to set up the completed machine as a whole.
However, after countless tries and failures, I was not able to get the machine to work all the way through. Each part worked on its own, but no matter what I do, they would not work together in order for the machine to run smoothly from start to finish. It was like each part had a mind of its own and would work whenever it wanted to. Even though the machine was not completely successful, I learned a lot about thinking outside of the box and being extremely patient.

Let’s see the reclaimed Rube Goldberg Machine in action!